


sail with me to someplace new

by almostafantasia



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, Alternate Universe - Pirates, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Enemies to Lovers, Eventual Smut, F/F, Pirates
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-22
Updated: 2017-08-19
Packaged: 2018-10-22 19:01:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 32,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10703148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/almostafantasia/pseuds/almostafantasia
Summary: When Clarke learns that her father’s trading ship has been attacked by pirates, she sets out on a daring rescue mission. The only problems – Jake could be being held prisoner anywhere in the Caribbean and Clarke has never sailed a ship before. To help save her father’s life, Clarke attempts to enlist the help of the notorious Captain Lexa Woods, a fearsome pirate who is just as broody and mysterious as she is unwilling to offer her assistance.





	1. Chapter 1

Secrets.

The town of Nassau feeds off them. With sailors of every kind passing through the port every day and the pirate population rumoured to outnumber everybody else, the town drips with corruption and delinquency, and with that comes the secrets.

Clarke Griffin trades in them. Her mother runs a very respectable medical practice from their cottage using medicines and equipment acquired through not so respectable methods. Being the daughter of the best doctor in town means that Clarke is a familiar face to many, which has its share of advantages. The people in Nassau love to gossip as much as they love to drink – who is sleeping with who, who is working on which ship, who has stolen what from somebody else – and Clarke hears it all. She trades gossip for more gossip, then trades those secrets for tangible goods; medicines, herbs, ointments, even gold. It always amazes Clarke what some people are willing to exchange for the right piece of information.

Abby Griffin turns a blind eye to what her daughter gets up to around town. As long as Clarke helps her with the patients a few mornings each week and returns home safely each night, Abby pays very little attention to how Clarke acquires the supplies she needs to keep the medical practice in business, particularly with Clarke’s father away for often months at a time working on a trading ship bring imported goods into the Caribbean.

Besides, Clarke trading secrets for medicinal supplies is hardly the most scandalous or illegal thing happening in a town inhabited by so many pirates.

Having lived in Nassau since the age of three, Clarke knows the streets of the little town as well as anybody could, the web of wide dirt paths and hidden alleyways ingrained in her memory as clearly as if she were holding a map of the streets in her hand. The walk from the apothecary by the docks to her own house a little further inland is not far – she made the outward journey earlier in the day in just a few minutes, thanks to the shortcut behind the old tavern – but it feels much longer on the way back home with the new cargo in her arms. The wooden box is awkward to carry, splintered edges digging harsh grooves into the soft skin of Clarke’s hands where she holds it up and the muscles in her upper arms screaming out in pain under its heavy weight, a reminder that she is not as strong as the young lad who packed the box up for her to take home with her.

She makes the final turn onto the familiar road upon which the small cottage she lives in with her mother is situated, scuffing up a cloud of dust in her hurry to get home before her arms give out completely under the weight of the box.

“Mother!”

With her lack of available hands to knock, Clarke settles for shouting through the oak door and giving it two hard kicks with the tip of her leather boots.

“Mother, it’s me! Can you let me in? I’m about to drop all the medicine!”

Clarke hears a flurry of activity on the other side of the door and it swings open within seconds to reveal Clarke’s mother, sleeves rolled up to the elbows and wisps of graying hair escaping from the hastily made bun on top of her head. It’s clear that she’s in the middle of something, or at least that might register with Clarke if the muscles in her arms weren’t crying out for her to relieve them of their heavy load.

Clarke pushes past her mother, ignoring the cry of protest as she rushes straight into the room on her immediate right, which her mother uses as a treatment room for patients.

Where she is met with the surprising (and, if Clarke is being completely frank, not entirely pleasant) sight of a bare man’s chest, scattered with dark wiry hair and where a horrible gash just beneath his collar bone is oozing a nasty mixture of blood and some other sticky fluid.

“Oh,” Clarke gapes, suddenly forgetting her desperation to drop the box in her arms as the sheer amount of unexpectedly naked male skin on show startles her into stillness. “Oh, I am _so_ sorry.”

The man, who is perched on the edge of the large wooden table in the centre of the room that Abby Griffin uses to treat her patients, wearing nothing but a loose pair of dark brown britches, seems unaffected by Clarke’s sudden clattering entrance to the room.

“Clarke, what have I told you about not entering this room without my say so?” Abby scolds her as she enters the room behind Clarke. “I could have been operating on somebody for all you knew!”

“Sorry,” Clarke mumbles, still determinedly avoiding staring at the shirtless man sitting on the table in the centre of the room as she places the crate down on the counter against the far wall of the room, the bottles within clinking as she does so, “but this box is heavy. I had to put it down or I would have dropped it.”

“I’m so sorry, Marcus,” Abby says to the man, and Clarke turns their way enough to watch as her mother dips her fingers into a pot of salve and starts rubbing it on the wound on the man’s chest. “Clarke, do you remember Marcus Kane?”

Clarke lets her eyes flicker up to the man’s face, meeting his dark eyes with her own and making a feeble attempt to return his warm smile as if she hasn’t just walked in on him in a state of semi-undress.

“Hello,” she says to him.

“Captain Kane works for the same trading company as your father,” Abby explains, dabbing the lower end of the cut with a warm washcloth that has the captain hissing in pain, and then smoothing over the area with the salve on her fingers. “He’s an old friend of Jake’s. He visited us many times when you were a child.”

Captain Kane’s face is familiar to Clarke, though she can say with a fair degree of certainty that it has been quite a few years since she has seen it before, and there are more lines around his eyes, more gray in his hair, than she recalls from the last time she saw him.

“You’ve grown up since I last saw you,” Marcus confirms Clarke’s thoughts. “You were just a girl, I think, causing your parents all kinds of trouble with the boy from across the road. What’s his name again? Thelonius’ son.”

“Wells,” Clarke answers for him.

“That’s it,” Marcus nods in recollection. “Quite the pair, you two. Are you still friends?”

Replying with a nod, Clarke then adds, “But we don’t see each other as much anymore. He’s busy working for his father and I help mother with the patients in here.”

Clarke’s eyes drop to the scar on Marcus’ upper chest again, this time allowing herself to examine it more closely. It’s a pretty long gash that stretches from near his shoulder to the centre of his breastbone, lying almost parallel to his clavicle. It doesn’t look particularly deep, but the blood that is caked into the hair on his upper chest makes it look no less vicious, most likely a brutal swipe of a sharp blade cutting through the skin.

“A swordfight?” Clarks hazards a guess.

“Pirates,” Marcus nods, the muscles in his forehead tensing into a bitter frown.

Clarke’s eyes widen in surprise at the word. It’s impossible to live in a town like Nassau and not be aware of the pirates, but they can be so difficult to distinguish from the normal honest sailors that Clarke tends to just lump them into one big group, along with the non-seafaring drunkards who live in the town. She knows a lot about the pirates who pass through Nassau and the dangerous and crooked lives that they lead, which is exactly why she tries her best to stay out of whatever trouble they might be causing next, unwilling to allow herself to be a victim in their next heinous plot.

“They attacked your ship?” Clarke gasps.

“No, nothing like that,” Marcus replies. “I tried to intervene in a fight in a tavern and one of them pulled out a knife.”

“That’s why I tell you to stay away from places like that,” Abby interjects, giving Clarke a stern look.

“I _do_ ,” insists Clarke.

It’s only a little bit of a lie. There’s only one inn that Clarke goes to, a fairly quiet one that is much further inland than the taverns that tend to be frequented by the rowdier sailors, and she doesn’t go to it very often either.

“That’s not what Raven has been telling me,” Abby comments, quirking a single eyebrow at her daughter.

Clarke blushes furiously and, not for the first time, mentally curses the fact that her best friend is one of her mother’s patients.

“And you seriously believe Raven over me?”

Abby crosses the room and opens a door on a wooden cabinet, pulling out a small box, from inside which she takes a sharp needle and some thread. As she makes her way back over to Marcus, she sends a smile Clarke’s way, warm and gentle and with the tiniest hint of an amused smirk threatening to pull at the very corners of her lips.

“I’m not angry, Clarke. I was young once.” For the briefest of moments, Clarke wrinkles her nose up in disgust at the thought of a teenage Abby running around the town getting up to the kind of things that Clarke does, but then Abby continues with much more solemnity, “I just worry about you more when your father is away.”

“He’ll be back soon though,” Clarke reminds her, her voice full of hopeful optimism that Jake will in fact return from his travels sooner rather than later.

There is a moment of silence as Abby frowns in concentration, splashing some alcohol over a fresh cloth and dabbing it across the cut on Marcus’ chest, then makes the first stitch to seal the wound. Marcus grimaces visibly, but makes no sound.

“I know,” Abby agrees with her daughter, continuing with a neat row of dark stitches that contrast against the pale skin of Marcus’ chest, “and then I can go back to worrying that _both_ of you will wake up drunk in an alleyway with no recollection of the previous night.”

Rolling her eyes once more, Clarke says, “That happened to Raven and not to me.”

“I know, sweetheart. I’m just teasing.”

Finishing up Marcus’ stitches, Abby cuts the thread with a pair of sharp silver scissors, placing the needle away to the side to be sterilised and smiling at Marcus.

“There, all done,” she tells him. Her mothering tone returning, she adds sternly, “And the same goes for you – stay out of trouble! No more trying to play the hero. You won’t be so lucky next time.”

Marcus bows his head slightly in shame as he reaches for his still-bloodstained shirt, slipping his arms into the sleeves and buttoning it up from the bottom. He leaves the top couple of buttons, the shirt hanging open enough to display part of his chest, and he casually rolls the sleeves up to his elbows before placing his tricorne hat on his head.

Returning her attention to Clarke, Abby says, “Thank you for your help this morning. You’re free to do whatever you want this afternoon.”

Trying not to seem too eager to get out of her mother’s company and out into the town, Clarke says, “I told Raven I’d see her later. I’ll be with her if you need me.”

“Stay safe,” Abby warns her, as Clarke makes her way towards the door.

Clarke’s default reaction is to roll her eyes she forgets to wait until she is out of Abby’s sight before doing so, earning herself a scolding glare from her mother.

“I mean it, Clarke. There are some dangerous people out there. You need to be careful.”

Clarke takes a deep breath, then plasters a fake smile of obedience onto her face, before responding dutifully, “Yes, mother.”

Pressing a quick kiss to Abby’s cheek, Clarke hurries out of the room and through the front door to go and find her best friend.

* * *

Raven is as predictable as the cycle of the sun and the moon and Clarke finds her, just as expected, tinkering with a boat down in the shipyard. She seems to sense Clarke’s approach more than she hears it, looking up from the long plank of wood she’s midway through sawing in half and shooting Clarke her signature smirk.

“Griffin.”

“You told my mother that we went to the tavern?”

It’s not the question that Clarke ever intended to open with, but with the conversation with her mother still fresh in her mind, it’s what ends up coming out of her mouth.

“Sorry, but your mother has a certain charm that I find it very difficult to lie to,” Ravens answers with a shrug, as she starts moving the saw back and forward in even strokes through the coarse wood once more. Raven lifts her head slightly, her brown eyes lit up with mischief, and then adds, “That, and I can’t be held accountable for anything that I do or say after taking morphine.”

Clarke perches herself on the edge of a bench near to Raven’s work station, where the shadow of the boat provides a welcome respite from the unrelenting heat of the afternoon Caribbean sun.

“Well, we may have only been to that inn a few times, but my mother probably thinks I’m an alcoholic.”

“There was that one time that you…” Raven starts unhelpfully.

“Yes, thank you, Raven,” Clarke is quick to interrupt, having been friends with Raven for long enough to know exactly where her best friend is heading with that sentence.

“I mean,” Raven screws up her face in disgust, “he wasn’t even that attractive…”

“ _Thank you, Raven_ ,” Clarke repeats through clenched teeth, flushing in shame at the memory of the night in question. Definitely not one of her finest moments.

As the saw in Raven’s hand finally makes its way through the entirety of the wood, one end of the neatly sawed plank drops to the deck with a clatter.

“Please don’t deny me of this one thing,” Raven grins wickedly. “It’s the only shit I have to hold against you.”

Raven tucks the shorter of the two halves of the plank beneath her arm and hauls herself up onto the stepladder beside the boat as best as she can with only one working leg. Clarke worries for a moment that Raven won’t be able to balance up there and gets ready to dart forwards and catch her, but Raven manages to support most of her weight on her good leg, using the wooden peg at the foot of the other as a prop to keep her stable.

“Can you pass me that hammer, please?”

Clarke’s eyes dance across Raven’s untidy workstation, where tools of all shapes and sizes lie haphazardly scattered in a mess that makes Clarke wonder how Raven ever manages to get any work done at all, let alone earn herself the reputation as one of the finest shipwrights in a town inhabited by sailors.

“Which one?”

Clarke can almost hear the way that Raven rolls her eyes in her tone as she answers, “One that looks like a hammer.”

Selecting a heavy tool from the crate at the foot of Raven’s stepladder, Clarke extends her arm to pass it up to her best friend. She watches as Raven pulls a couple of iron nails out of a pouch on the leather utility belt slung low on her hips, then starts to hammer the plank of wood in place over a hole in the side of the boat.

“Whose boat is this?” Clarke asks Raven, raising her voice so as to be heard over the rhythmic sound of the hammer hitting the head of the nail.

“That guy,” Raven replies, taking a couple of seconds out from hammering the nail to point over her shoulder with her thumb.

Clarke follows the direction of Raven’s thumb and her eyes fall on a burly guy with tattoos covering parts of his exposed skin and hair cut close to his scalp. He’s an intimidating figure, his eyebrows furrowed as he stares at the two girls near his boat and his muscled arms folded across his chest, and it’s a wonder that Clarke didn’t notice his presence before. Clarke gives him a meek wave, which he doesn’t return, and then turns her attention back to Raven.

“Wow,” says Clarke. “I hope you know what you’re doing because he looks like he’ll skin you alive if you put even one nail out of place.”

Raven stops what she’s doing and turns to give Clarke a look; one eyebrow quirked ever so slightly, the rest of her face impassive except for a glare in her eyes that looks like it could bore a hole right through Clarke’s skull.

“Have I ever made a mistake before?”

“I’d say that Kyle Wick was a pretty big mistake…”

Raven gives her mother of all scowls and Clarke worries for just a moment that the heavy tool in Raven’s hand is going to find a new home for itself embedded in Clarke’s head, until Raven’s gaze turns into a squint focused on something far behind Clarke.

“What’s tha- … oh my _god,_ I think it’s a body!”

Clarke’s head snaps around in the blink of an eye and she has no trouble spotting the dark person-shaped mass lying motionless on the pale sand in the distance.

Before she has time to even consider what she is doing, Clarke is running towards the body, the small heels of her leather boots getting awkwardly stuck in the sand with each stride that she takes and her long skirt swishing around her ankles. She hears a clatter behind her but doesn’t think to check that Raven is okay. (Raven has survived much worse than stumbling off a two-foot high stepladder, Clarke reasons, while this girl lying in the sand is quite clearly unconscious and could be in desperate need of urgent medical care, if she isn’t already dead.)

She’s about halfway there when she hears somebody coming up behind her, and she is briefly confused about who this person might be – the rhythmic thud of one heavy footstep after another, gradually getting louder as the mysterious person catches up with her, means that it can’t be Raven, who would need nothing short of a miracle to be able to chase after her on only one good leg. Clarke’s question is quickly answered, however, when the sailor who owns the boat that Raven is fixing overtakes Clarke on her left, his stride much larger than her own and his thick arms pumping fast as he shoots past Clarke.

He reaches the girl long before Clarke does, and by the time that Clarke finally reaches them, out of breath and a little sweaty, the sailor has already rolled the girl onto her back and has his ear against her chest, checking for her heartbeat.

“Is she breathing?” Clarke wheezes, bringing one hand up to her hip to clutch at the ache in her side as she drops to her knees on the sand next to the unconscious girl.

“Only just,” the man replies gruffly. “She needs warming up. I can make her up a bed on my ship.”

Clarke dismisses his suggestion at once with a shake of her head.

“She needs immediate medical attention,” Clarke insists. “My mother is a doctor. We live five minutes away. If you can carry her, I can show you the way.”

The man hesitates for just a moment, his dark eyes fixed on Clarke as he assesses her words, but when he glances back down to the barely breathing girl on the sand between them, he makes his decision and gives Clarke a curt nod. He sweeps the girl up into his arms almost effortlessly, draping one of her arms around his neck as he cradles her against his chest like a small child, then looks at Clarke expectantly.

“Let’s go,” Clarke says decisively. She looks up at the sailor as they begin their journey off the beach and onto the boardwalk that lines the docks. “I’m Clarke, by the way. Clarke Griffin.”

The man grunts out a single word in response.

"Lincoln."


	2. Chapter 2

Once the girl has been checked over for any major concerns and tucked into bed amongst a pile of soft blankets in the spare upstairs bedroom of the Griffin cottage, there’s really not much more that can be done other than to wait for her to rouse from her sleep.

Clarke finds herself on duty as the evening draws in, with her mother busy tending to another patient downstairs, and she sets herself up in the corner of the spare room with a few sheets of yellowing paper and a piece of charcoal, watching over the girl as she sleeps peacefully in the bed. The lighting in the room is almost perfect for drawing, dusky light filtering in through the shutters on the window and a lone candle flickering softly on the table beside the bed illuminates the girl’s face in a hazy orange glow and dark shadows. Clarke amuses herself by lightly outlining the curve of the sleeping girl’s forehead and the sharp planes of her jaw, then traces over her pale sketch with much bolder lines, smudging in the shadows using the residue of charcoal that gathers on the pad of her left thumb as she draws.

The light outside the room shifts, gloomier than before as night starts to fall across the pale face before Clarke in a slightly different way than it did a minute ago, and Clarke has to complete the last few patches of light and dark through guesswork so as to not ruin her sketch with misplaced shading.

Letting the sketch of the girl slide from her lap to the floor, Clarke takes up a second piece of paper and turns her attention to the candle beside the bed. With only a third of the candlestick remaining, the wax drips down the side in a way that is most aesthetic, collecting unevenly at the base of the candle. Clarke takes up the charcoal once more, intent on capturing the beauty of the candle and its wavering orange flame, but no sooner has she put charcoal to paper, does she hear a raspy breath from the bed, followed by some choking coughs.

Clarke is on her feet in no time at all. The paper and charcoal fall forgotten to the floor and she lunges for the small metal bucket that stands near the foot of the bed, thrusting it into the newly awoken girl’s lap just in time for her to retch into it.

“Mother!” Clarke calls out. She backs away from the bed enough to reach the door, which she opens while still keeping both eyes on the spluttering girl, and then shouts slightly louder out into the hallway at the top of the stairs. “Mother, she’s awake!”

Abby arrives quickly, her footsteps getting gradually louder as she races up the wooden staircase and bursts through the doorway into the spare bedroom. The girl, no longer throwing up into the bucket and now slightly more awake and aware of her surroundings, looks around the room with an expression of utter confusion on her face.

“Where am I?” she rasps. “Who are you? Where is my brother?”

“You’re in Nassau,” Abby explains kindly, as she moves away from the bed for just a few seconds to pick up a tankard full of water left on top of the dresser earlier in the evening. Taking the bucket from the girl and placing it back down on the floor next to the bed just in case, Abby offers the water to the girl and continues, “You washed up on the beach here. My name is Abby and I’m a doctor. As for your brother, I’m afraid I can’t answer that until I know who you are.”

Eying the strangers around her cautiously, the girl answers with just a single word.

“Octavia.”

Abby leans over and wraps the blankets tighter around the shivering girl, cocooning her in their soft warmth.

“Where do you come from, Octavia?” she asks.

“England,” the girl answers, her voice still just a croak, and she takes a long swig of water from the pitcher cupped in her trembling hands. “Bellamy and I, we…”

“Bellamy is your brother?” Abby asks for clarification and Octavia responds with a nod.

“We were on a boat bound for Jamaica. After our mother died, Bellamy got a job on a boat but I had nowhere to go. One of the sailors on Bellamy’s ship helped to smuggle me onboard and hid me behind a loose panel in the brig. He said that once the boat made it to the Caribbean, he would bring me to his wife and that she would give me a place to sleep. Only we never made it. Pirates attacked our ship and took hostage anybody they didn’t kill. The only reason I made it out was because I was hidden deep in the ship when it was blown apart.”

Octavia’s face screws up in deep thought as she recalls the painful memories.

“One minute I was holding on for my life to a piece of debris from the ship,” she continues, “and the next I was here in this bed.”

She looks up, first to Abby and then to Clarke, her expression expectant as if hoping for one of them to fill in the gaps in her memory. Clarke doesn’t really know what to say beyond what has already been said – that Octavia washed up on the shore and that the plan is for Abby to take care of her until she is fit enough to be alright on her own. Or at least, that _was_ the plan. Knowing what she does now, that Octavia is all alone on what is not only a completely new island, but one that is on the other side of the world to her previous home, Clarke gets an uneasy feeling in the pit of her stomach at the thought of letting the girl go out there on her own once she is back to full health.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Abby says sincerely.

“Bellamy isn’t dead!” Octavia is quick to protest, raising her voice, though the strain is slightly too much for her this soon and she starts coughing once more, her face and the upper part of her neck turning a deep red colour as she struggles to breathe unobstructed.

“I was talking about your mother,” Abby explains. “I’m sure your brother is still out there somewhere.”

Octavia drains the rest of the water in her recovery, her features still slightly red but the nasty wheezing cough no longer there, and then sets the empty metal tankard down on the table beside the bed with a heavy clunk. Abby reaches out for it immediately and passes it across to Clarke.

“Clarke, would you please fetch her some more water?”

Clarke inclines her head slightly in obedience and gets to her feet, the handle of the pitcher grasped tightly with the fingers of her left hand.

“Clarke? As in Clarke _Griffin_?”

Clarke stills, a prickly shiver slowly makes its way down her spine, almost as somebody is dripping tiny amounts of ice cold water down the back of her shirt. She pivots on the spot, staring at the girl that lies in amongst the sheets and blankets on the bed, and with her voice barely more than a whisper, Clarke says, “How do you know my name?”

Octavia swallows visibly, then answers, “Clarke is an unusual name for a girl. Your father…” Octavia trails off, her teeth digging anxiously into her lower lip as her green eyes flicker between Abby and Clarke, testing for their reactions before she continues, “was the man who helped to hide me on the ship. He smuggled food and water down to me and…”

It is as if the entire world has stopped around Clarke and nothing exists except this moment; Octavia staring up at her with a look of apologetic concern as the implication of her words seep into every fibre of Clarke’s body with a chilling sense of horror. Clarke’s emotions are in turmoil, somewhere between trepidation and pure nausea, and what can only be a fraction of a second seems to drag on for hours as the terror sets in completely.

“Dad was on your ship?” she chokes past the lump that has formed in the back of her throat. Raising her voice as much as she can, Clarke takes a couple of steps closer to Octavia’s bed and says, “The ship that got attacked by pirates? What happened to him? _Where is he_?”

“Clarke!”

Abby’s hand lands firmly on Clarke’s shoulder, stopping her from getting any closer to Octavia. She struggles slightly but Abby’s grip remains strong, and Clarke has to relent, her shoulders slumping in defeat.

“I don’t know,” Octavia tells them, voice pleading and eyes shimmering with the threatening onset of tears. “I don’t know what happened to any of them.”

Clarke turns her attention to her mother and sees the same resounding sadness that she feels overwhelming her own mind reflected on Abby’s tired face.

“He’s going to be okay, Clarke,” Abby says, her voice determined but shaky, and Clarke wonders briefly how much her mother actually believes those words herself. “The Royal Navy won’t stand for this. They’re rounding up pirates and they’ll catch those responsible to have them hung for their crimes and Jake will come back to us as if it never happened. He’s going to be fine.”

Clarke wants to believe her mother, she really does, but just the thought of pirates destroying her father’s ship and kidnapping him is enough to open up a hole of despair deep within Clarke’s chest that seems to suck all positivity out of her body. She swallows, a tricky feat considering the painful lump still lodged in her throat, and blinks back her tears, willing herself to keep it together at least until she is alone and can let it all out.

“Water, Clarke,” Abby says once more, gesturing to the tankard that is still clutched in Clarke’s white knuckle grip.

Clarke spares one last look at Octavia, whose eyes are filled with a pleading apology, then hurries out of the room and down the stairs to the kitchen. Once there, she places the tankard down on the table and leans against the wall, one of her hands covering her eyes as she takes several deep breaths and tries not to imagine the kind of trouble that her father might be in. It’s difficult not to though, and Clarke can’t help but picture Jake locked up in the brig of an enormous pirate ship, a piece of cloth in his mouth as a gag and his hands tied behind his back with a length of coarse rope.

She’s saved from the terrible images racing through her mind, and the possibility that Jake Griffin’s situation could be _much_ worse than what she’s currently picturing, by a heavy knock on the front door of the cottage. Abandoning the task given to her by her mother, Clarke rushes to answer it, flinging the door open to reveal the sailor from the docks earlier in the day.

“Lincoln,” Clarke greets him, standing aside to let him into the house.

The ever-present frown still etched on his surly face, Lincoln steps through the door and lets Clarke close it behind him.

“How is she?” he asks.

Lincoln follows Clarke into the kitchen and watches as she hastily fills the tankard with water.

“She’s awake,” Clarke tells him, guiding him towards the staircase with the full mug of water clutched in her hands. “You can see for yourself.”

Once upstairs, Clarke re-enters the spare bedroom with Lincoln on her heels to find Abby leaning over Octavia pressing a wet cloth to her forehead and taking her temperature with the thermometer protruding from between Octavia’s lips.

“This is Lincoln,” Clarke tells the girl as she places the tankard down on the nightstand where it is easily accessible for Octavia to reach on her own. “He was there when we found you on the beach. He’s the one who carried you here.”

Lincoln nods a silent greeting to Octavia, who in turn gives the newcomer an appraising glance from head to toe and then, her voice muffled slightly by the thermometer caught between her lips, offers a soft, “Thank you.”

Lifting the cloth from Octavia’s forehead and extracting the thermometer from her mouth, Abby stands upright, her face doused in concern.

“I think she’s coming down with a bit of a fever. I’m going to make some soup for her. Can you stay here with her please, Clarke?”

Abby gives Clarke a certain look, her brown eyes filled with a glare of warning as if to say _don’t you dare do anything stupid while I’m gone_. Clarke manages to stop herself from rolling her eyes and forces herself to nod as she obediently answers, “Yes, mother.”

Abby has barely left the room before Clarke’s mind is whirring ahead, her mouth moving even faster.

“So, about your brother…”

“I need to find him,” Octavia insists, her green eyes fierce as if to challenge Clarke to tell her otherwise. “As soon as I’m strong enough to leave this bed, I’m going out there to look for him.”

“And I’m going with you,” Clarke says determinedly, through clenched teeth. “If what you’re saying is true, my father has been kidnapped by pirates too. We can find them together.”

Lincoln, still lurking in the shadows by the door, steps forward until his face is illuminated by the light of the candle that still burns beside the bed.

“I think I know somebody who can help.”

* * *

The plume of smoke that stretches up from the charred remains of the destroyed ship into the sky like a huge infernal tower is visible from miles away. On a clear day like today, it acts like a beacon, probably visible to half of the Caribbean.

Most pirates know who is responsible for the destruction, and most pirates know to stay away.

Captain Lexa Woods is not like most pirates.

“It’s Nia again, isn’t it?”

Lowering her brass telescope, Lexa hooks it back onto the leather belt that hangs loosely around her hips and turns to address the sandy haired boy at her side, who stares out at the debris in the distance with an expression of dumbfounded shock on his face.

“It is,” Lexa confirms with a nod.

“Why does she do it?”

The tone of his voice, the innocence of the words that are coming from someone who has seen some bad things in his short lifetime, but is still really just a _boy_ , who can’t yet have a true understanding of what evil is, is enough to send a desperate need to protect her youngest crew member straight through Lexa’s weary heart.

“I wish I knew that, Aden,” Lexa answers wistfully.

It is indeed a question that has plagued Lexa’s mind during many long and sleepless nights aboard her ship _Polis_ , but she still can’t work out why Captain Nia seems so intent on destroying everything that Lexa has ever worked towards. In fact, the best and _only_ reason she’s managed to come up with is spite, which still doesn’t feel like a very good explanation. If Lexa has learnt anything in her lifetime, it’s that a pirate won’t usually do anything if there isn’t some kind of personal reward at the end of it.

“Maybe she’s just a bad person,” suggest Aden.

“Maybe,” Lexa replies noncommittally.

“What’s the plan?” Aden asks, his eyes wide in anticipation as he awaits the orders from his captain. “Are we going after her?”

Lexa shakes her head.

“That’s what she wants us to do. We’re going to carry on as normal. We’re docking in Nassau tonight to restock the ship. We’ll spend two nights there I think, maybe three. The crew deserve a little rest.”

Amused, Aden says, “You know that they’ll spend the entire time drinking and whoring, don’t you?”

“Who am I to stop them?” Lexa shrugs, “They’re good men.”

“And what will you do?” Aden asks, his voice full of childlike curiosity.

Lexa narrows her eyes, deep in thought, her gaze not shifting from the smoking wreckage of the ship as she ambiguously replies, “I’ll find something to keep me busy.”


	3. Chapter 3

Clarke stares out at the ship on the horizon, gradually getting bigger as it approaches the port. Even with her limited knowledge of ships, Clarke can tell that it’s a majestic vessel, white sails billowing in the wind and huge bow cutting through the water with ease. It’s an unmarked ship, but a ship of that size without a flag can only belong to pirates.

“They call her the Commander?”

Lincoln nods once, his impassive gaze not moving from where it rests on the approaching ship.

“You’re suggesting we go after pirates with the help of more pirates?” Clarke asks sceptically, and it is only through saying the words aloud that she realises what a ridiculous plan this is. If her father has taught her anything, it’s that a pirate can never be trusted.

“I know who has taken your father and there is nobody better to help than Lexa.”

“Lexa?” Clarke tests the name out and decides that she doesn’t like the bitter taste that it leaves on her lips.

“The Commander,” Lincoln clarifies.

Clarke hesitates for a few seconds, the contents of her stomach twisting and churning uneasily at the thought of trusting a pirate with the rescue of her father. Particularly a pirate with a ship that size of the one that approaches the port right now and with the nickname of _the Commander_.

She’s heard of this Commander, little snippets from sailors across the town, but never quite enough to be able to form an expectation in her head. Some people speak of her with fear in their voices, others with a sense of awe, but nobody ever divulges enough for Clarke to actually know anything about the Commander. Clarke can hardly even begin to imagine how fearsome this particular pirate is going to be.

The Commander is a compete enigma and Clarke is simultaneously curious as to how she has deserved such a reputation and petrified of finding that out.

“I don’t know,” Clarke says uncertainly, teeth digging into her lower lip almost hard enough to draw blood.

“What other options do you have?”

Clarke opens her mouth to answer, then promptly shuts it again. The only other idea she has relies on Lincoln being willing to let them sail his little fishing boat blindly out into the ocean. Which, frankly, is a ridiculous idea considering the fact that they would have a crew of four, if Raven and Lincoln are willing to join the two girls on their quest to rescue their kidnapped family members, and no idea where they are heading.

“None,” Clarke concedes glumly.

“Then let me speak to her,” Lincolns pleads. “The Commander is a reasonable woman. She’ll at least be willing to listen.”

Clarke frowns at the ship, deep in thought about the mysterious woman at its helm, before giving Lincoln a single nod of her head.

“Fine.”

* * *

Clarke cannot believe that barely a day after the warning from her mother to stay away from the taverns in the town that are frequented by pirates, she finds herself standing in the entrance to one such establishment. And dressed as a _boy_ , no less.

Her makeshift costume is most ill-fitting – the britches are a little too tight and the shirt is a little too loose – and the hat upon her head does a poor job of concealing the long blonde tresses that she’s messily pinned into place beneath it, but the lighting in the pub is dim enough (and the customers are drunk enough) that nobody pays any attention to Clarke and her rather hastily put together disguise.

The bar is far rowdier than any that Clarke has ever visited before. A trio of musicians plays a raucous hornpipe on the far side of the tavern, though the music itself can hardly be heard over the sheer volume of noise coming from everybody else. Clarke can hear at least two different sea shanties being sung drunkenly from those closest to her, people shout to be heard over the sounds of general chatter and tankards clinking against each other, and nobody seems to playing the slightest bit of attention as one man punches another in the face over by the bar, as if it is such a regular occurrence that it demands no special focus.

Pushing her way through the crowd of drunk sailors, Clarke pushes herself up onto a stool and orders an ale from the maid behind the bar. Her attempt to deepen her voice is futile, as is the way that she keeps her head bowed so that her face stays in the shadow of the brim of her hat, when the woman places a frothing tankard down on the counter with a, “Here you go, sweetie.”

Sliding a single gold coin across the bar (which, Clarke notes with wide eyes, the barmaid accepts and then stores in her bosom), Clarke drops off the stool and makes her way back into the crowd. Her eyes fall on the broad back of a familiar figure, alone at a table nursing his own drink, and Clarke takes up an empty seat where she can see Lincoln but he won’t be able to see her unless he turns around in his chair.

Nothing happens for a while. Clarke sips her drink and Lincoln finishes his, and when he goes back up to the bar to order a second, Clarke is left wondering if maybe dressing up as a boy to blend in and spy on Lincoln is all going to be for nothing.

But then it happens.

Clarke doesn’t piece it together at first - she doesn’t even think to make the connection between this ‘Commander’ woman that Lincoln is supposed to be meeting and the absolute _goddess_ that walks into the tavern the that exact moment.

Because she definitely can’t be anything less than a goddess, looking as jaw-droppingly majestic she does.

She’s dressed like everybody else in this tavern, but holy _shit_ does she stand out from the crowd. She wears a long, dark coat over her clothes, just a simple white shirt and brown britches the same as Clarke and every other sailor in this room, but the cuffs hang loose, leaving just a tantalising glimpse of muscled forearm on show. Her long fingers are decorated with gold rings embellished with twinkling jewels, a pair of slim but deadly looking swords hang from scabbards attached to the belt around her waist, and a leather tricorne hat sits perched atop of mane of braided chocolate brown hair.

But it is her face that is what has Clarke choking on her ale, the bitter liquid getting caught at the back of her throat and then dribbling unattractively down her chin and onto the white fabric of her shirt. Her face is unblemished apart from a tiny faded scar on one of her rosy cheeks and her expression is unreadably pure, almost too innocent for somebody who has two lethal weapons strapped to her hips and who knows how many others concealed beneath the heavy fabric of her coat.

Done making an embarrassment of herself, Clarke tilts her hat up to take a better look at the new arrival, only to have the greenest eyes she has ever seen meet her gaze as the woman scans the room and notices Clarke staring at her.

Clarke turns away immediately, raising a hand to tip her hat back down over her eyes, her cheeks flushing a deep red colour. She might be here to keep an eye on Lincoln’s mysterious meeting but that doesn’t mean that she can’t have a bit of fun afterwards, and it’s just Clarke’s luck that the prettiest lady in the room lays eyes on her when she has fucking _beer_ dripping down her chin.

Pushing all thought of the attractive sailor to the back of her mind for later, because it is at the very least an amusing tale that she can recount to Raven in the morning, no doubt to much glee from her best friend, Clarke turns her attention back to Lincoln.

Only to find that the woman, the _exact_ same woman that has just reduced Clarke into a dribbling mess, is greeting Lincoln with a handshake and taking a seat opposite him.

No way.

No fucking _way_.

Clarke almost refuses to believe that the two women can be one and the same, that this fine specimen of a human being can be the terrifying pirate commander that the whole of Nassau speaks of so mysteriously. Since watching that ship sail into the port, Clarke has spent the whole day picturing the Commander in her head; every version brought images of a brutish woman to mind, butch and tattooed and twice as fearsome as any other pirate she’s ever laid eyes on, but the reality is so different that Clarke could almost laugh. Nothing about this woman, with her slight build and wide eyes, barely older than Clarke herself, suggests that she could be a commander of the seas.

And there is absolutely nothing about this woman that implies that she could be capable of leading a mission to rescue Jake.

As Lincoln and the Commander enter into a deep discussion, the rowdiness of the bar is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because with so much activity going on around them, Clarke is fairly confident that Lincoln isn’t going to turn around and spot her any time soon, but also curse because she really wishes that she could actually hear what the pair are talking about, instead of only being able to watch them from a distance.

Clarke stays where she is, lurking in the shadows but perched on the edge of her seat. Her hands cradle the tankard of ale on the table in front of her but the drink remains forgotten, her attention fixed on nothing except the conversation taking place across the room.

Her focus elsewhere, Clarke doesn’t even notice the quarrel that breaks out nearby until one of the men barrels into her table, sending her drink flying and a cold wash of beer splashing into her lap.

“Hey, watch it!” she yells, jumping to her feet and glaring at the drunk man.

“Sorry, love,” he leers at her, a thick Cockney accent curling around his words. “Let me buy you another one.”

With quite a bit of effort and much protesting, Clarke turns down his offer, knowing from experience that in letting him buy a drink, she’s sending the wrong kind of signals his way. Disaster averted, Clarke returns her attention to Lincoln and his companion.

Only to find the same green eyes from before staring at her from across the bar.

A small crease forms between the pirate’s furrowed eyebrows, and even though she nods along and says something in response to Lincoln, her gaze remains on Clarke, as if nobody else in the room exists.

The woman finally turns her attention back to Lincoln, leaving Clarke sitting alone in the corner covered in beer and full of regret for a wasted evening.

* * *

Clarke leaves the tavern pretty soon after that, early enough that she won’t get caught up in any particularly violent drunken brawls but late enough that she knows her mother probably won’t be awake when she gets home to smell that ale that soaks into her clothing.

It’s completely dark now, the street lit by the light of the moon on a clear Caribbean night and the occasional oil lamp hanging from a fixture on the side of buildings. Fully aware that she’s a young woman alone in a part of town that is frequented by pirates, Clarke crosses the road in a hurry and ducks into a dark alleyway, using her knowledge of all the side streets to plot the quickest way home that will avoid some of the wilder areas of town.

She barely makes it a few paces before she becomes aware of a dark figure in the shadows at the other end of the alley and realises that her plan has already failed. The stranger is much quicker than her, and before Clarke gets the chance to turn on her feet and race back towards the inn, the air gets knocked out of her lungs and her hat tumbles from her head to the floor as the figure grabs Clarke by the thin fabric of her shirt, pressing her roughly against the wall with a strong forearm across her chest and the blade of a small knife pressed close to her throat.

“What are you after?”

The words are enough for Clarke to establish that her assailant is a woman, and when Clarke peers up at her face, letting her eyes adjust to the gloom, her eyes widen as she recognises Lincoln’s associate from the bar.

_The Commander_.

Clarke has no idea how the woman managed to leave the tavern and make her way around to accost Clarke at the other end of the alley, because she had _definitely_ still been seated beside Lincoln when Clarke made her hasty exit, but with the sharp blade against her neck stopping her from making any sudden movements to escape, she starts to realise that maybe she underestimated this woman and her capabilities.

“I…” Clarke gasps, struggling within the Commander’s grasp as much as she can without letting the knife actually cut into her skin. “I don’t want anything!”

“Lies!” the Commander spits into Clarke’s face, strengthening her hold and making it even harder for Clarke to breathe. “I saw you watching me back there. Who are you working for? Who set you up to this?”

“Nobody,” Clarke pleads for her life. “I swear!”

Clarke’s heartbeat quickens in her chest as the Commander leans even closer to her, the fearsome scowl on her face making Clarke absolutely certain that she’s about to lose her life.

_This is it_ , Clarke thinks. _Barely even eighteen measly years of life and she’s going to meet her end in an alleyway to the pirate’s blade._

“Lexa. She’s with me.”

Clarke lets out a long breath of relief when she hears Lincoln’s deep voice from somewhere in the shadows, and were the Commander’s arm not still firmly pressing her shoulders against the wall, her legs would probably give out beneath her and send her sliding down to the floor.

Releasing her grip on Clarke and roughly shoving her to the side, the Commander turns to glower at Lincoln.

“ _You_?” she demands, tilting her chin up so that she is almost looking down on Lincoln, despite the extra few inches of height that he has on her. “You put her up to this? You trust me so little that you asked somebody to watch our meeting from a distance.”

The Commander’s tone is scornful and when Lincoln, to his credit, does not even flinch, Clarke remembers that Lincoln _knows_ this Commander, which means he knows which limits he can test. One look at the two of them facing each other in the alleyway, like two alphas of the pack standing off against each other, is enough for Clarke to realise that Lincoln’s hulking figure has twice the muscle and that he can most likely handle himself against the Commander.

In a truly inspired moment of bravery, knowing that Lincoln is there to come to her aid, Clarke swallows thickly and makes the decision to stand up to the Commander.

“It was my idea,” Clarke speaks up, taking a step forward to stand between the Commander and Lincoln, though she knows from experience that the Commander would be able to overpower her and cast her aside in an instant if she wanted to get to him. “Lincoln didn’t know I was here. He told me that you could help me save my father.”

The Commander tilts her head to the side, considering Clarke’s words for just a moment, then replies coldly, “Then he was wrong. I’m not saving your father or anybody else.”

Panic rising like bile in her throat as she tries not to imagine any of the terrible gruesome ends that her father could meet if she doesn’t get to him in time, Clarke tries to protest.

“But…”

“ _No_.” The Commander’s voice is authoritative and condescending, and though Clarke wants to stand strong and put up a fight, she can’t help but tremble under the intimidating glare. Her words laced with disgust, the Commander continues, “I make a point of staying far away from Captain Nia and nobody will persuade me to do otherwise. Not my crew, not Lincoln, and _especially_ not an eavesdropping island girl with no idea how things work in the real world beyond her own front door.”

The Commander turns, her long coat swishing around her calves as she does so in what somehow manages to be a display of power. She stops in front of Lincoln, looking at him in complete disdain.

“And you,” she snarls. “Stay away from me.”

She sweeps out of the alley, draining all hope from their air as she goes, leaving Clarke rooted to the spot in a state of complete shock at the fast and unexpected turn her evening has taken in the last few minutes.

“I’m sorry,” Lincoln says gruffly, his expression unreadable in the darkness, before he too makes his exit, leaving Clarke alone in the dingy alleyway, heart racing and her eyes prickling with the beginning of tears.


	4. Chapter 4

“Remind me why we’re meeting in the middle of the night again?”

Clarke’s small bedroom on the upper floor of the Griffin house has been set up almost as if they are about to partake in a séance, three girls gathered around a lone candle on a table, curtains billowing in the cool night air that breezes through the window, through which the merest glimpse of moonlit ocean is visible in the distance. They huddle around the flame, faces lit up with a bright orange glow that casts eerie shadows around.

A lone figure lurks in the corner, shrouded in darkness, and Lincoln’s fingers play absentmindedly with the hilt of a small dagger as he observes the three girls in the middle of the room.

“Because we’re _conspiring_ ,” Octavia answers Raven’s question, shooting her a look that is full of meaning. Tilting her head to the side, one corner of Octavia’s mouth pushes up into a little smirk as she adds slightly cockily, “Everybody knows you can’t do that during the day.”

Raven, meeting Octavia for the first time since they initially found the girl washed up on the beach, turns to look at her with a look of deep consideration on her face, one eyebrow arched in query. After a few moments of thoughtful hesitation, Raven’s entire figure relaxes and she reaches out to give Octavia a congratulatory pat on the shoulder.

“I like this one, Clarke,” Raven tells Clarke, a tiny smile on her face as she gives Octavia the Raven Reyes seal of approval. “Can we keep her?”

“Only if you help me find my brother,” Octavia quips back, her words causing the almost jovial mood of the room to vanish immediately, replaced with a much darker silence as they all remember the reason why they are gathered.

“So,” Clarke begins, taking the initiative to lead the meeting, “we have a problem and her name, according to the Commander, is Captain Nia.”

Clarke glances across to Lincoln, who sits alone in the corner of the room, observing the three girls more than he is there to join in with their discussion, and he gives Clarke a quick nod in confirmation.

“Sorry, could you go over who this Commander person is again?” Raven asks for clarification.

Clarke looks up to Lincoln once more, gesturing for him to take over. He does so, leaning forward in his seat slightly so that his face is illuminated fully in the orange glow of the candlelight, the attention of all three girls on him alone as he starts to speak.

“Captain Woods,” he starts ominously, his dark eyes flicking from Clarke, to Raven, to Octavia, where they linger for just a fraction of a second, before returning to Clarke again. “Commander Lexa. She’s one of the most respected pirates in these waters. You must know the history of pirates in Nassau?”

Clarke and Raven are quick to nod, while Octavia frowns and shakes her head.

“Nassau is home for many pirates when they aren’t at sea,” Lincoln explains for Octavia’s benefit. “It’s one of the few places in the Caribbean where the pirates haven’t been driven out. Not that the British Navy haven’t tried,” Lincoln adds with a grimace. “The pirates have held onto Nassau and the surrounding waters for longer than they should have been able to.”

With a glance to Octavia to check that she’s following his words, answered with a curt nod, Lincoln continues.

“I don’t know how much interaction any of you have ever had with pirates,” Lincoln says, looking between the three girls, “but you don’t need to spend long in the company of one to realise what kind of people they are.”

“Drunkards,” Raven mumbles under her breath.

“Yes, and no,” Lincoln answers her. “As with any profession, you get the good and you get the bad. But what unites all pirates is a certain thirst for independence. The _Jolly Roger_ – the flag that you’ll see on many pirate ships – comes from a plain black flag that would be flown if the captain didn’t sail under the flag of a nation. Pirates sail under black flags as an act of defiance against law and justice.”

“This is all very interesting,” interjects Clarke, “but what does this have to do with the Commander?”

“Nassau is predominantly a pirate town and when you have so many pirate in such a small place, so many strong-minded people with no laws to follow sailing in the surrounding seas, it causes problems. There are rifts between rival pirate factions, battles on the seas over the smallest of insignificances – all of which makes it easier for the Royal Navy to take back Nassau. Of course, they haven’t succeeded yet, despite being close twice, and that’s down to Lexa.

“Captain Woods has brought more peace to the waters around Nassau than any other pirate before her,” Lincoln tells them. “She’s brought together groups of pirates who have been at war with each other for decades, uniting them towards a common goal.” When the three girls stare expectantly at Lincoln, awaiting further explanation, he elaborates with a single word, “Freedom.”

Clarke thinks back to the Commander as she knows her, as the woman who pinned Clarke to the wall of an alleyway with a knife to her throat, before swiftly announcing that she wasn’t willing to offer her help towards possibly saving a man’s life, and tries to imagine her as a peacemaker. But peace and compassion are not words that she associates with the surly Commander – rude, _yes_ , and most definitely selfish and condescending, but definitely not the nautical diplomat that Lincoln paints her to be.

Her eyebrows knit together in a dissatisfied frown as Lincoln continues his story.

“Captain Nia doesn’t like what Lexa has done because the other pirates all respect Lexa now, they follow _her_ orders. She earned the title of Commander because if she wanted to, she could command an entire fleet of ships against her enemies. Nia doesn’t like that. Nia used to be known at the Queen of the Seas, but then Lexa came along. So now Nia is trying to prove a point by sinking ships and killing people – she wants people to know that she’s stronger than Lexa.”

“And is she?” Clarke dares to ask, a small part of her not wanting to know the answer.

“Stronger than Lexa?” Lincoln asks, turning his head to look into Clarke’s eyes. He gives a little noncommittal shrug and answers, “I don’t know. Lexa would never do what Nia’s doing, that much I can tell you. But you have to realise that no matter how many people she threatens or kidnaps, they all still remain loyal to Lexa, which makes Nia even angrier. So she sinks more ships and kills more people just because she can.”

The room falls into silence, the three girls staring at Lincoln with enrapture as they process his words.

“Wow,” Raven lets out long breath, staring at Lincoln in awe. “I’ve been a shipwright in this town for more than four years, I deal with sailors and pirates every single day but I never had a clue that there was so much politics involved in piracy. The drinking songs make it sound so jolly; pillaging and plundering and taking women to bed. I never knew this kind of thing was going on.”

“It’s Tortuga’s worst kept secret.”

Raven chuckles knowingly under her breath and Clarke shakes her head disapprovingly, thinking of the many tales she’s heard of Tortuga, each one impossibly worse than the one before. Octavia, however, screws her face up in confusion.

“Tortuga?” she tentatively asks.

“It’s a pirate stronghold southeast of here,” Clarke explains. “I’ve only heard tales of it. _Terrible_ tales.”

“If you ever have the misfortune of finding yourself in the shittier parts of Nassau,” Raven elaborates on Clarke’s words, smirking in amusement at Octavia’s wide eyes, a combination of intrigue and fear, “then Tortuga is rumoured to be ten times worse.”

Octavia wrinkles her nose, and then says drily, “I think I’ll give it a miss.”

Humming in agreement, Clarke nods absently, before she remembers why they are here and steers the meeting back on track.

“So Nia has my father and Octavia’s brother?” she says, gaze flicking across to Lincoln once again, aiming the question at him even though she thinks that she already knows the answer.

“I’d put my life on it,” Lincoln nods. “It’s something she would do.”

“You mean sink a trading ship just because she can?” Raven jokes, but when she realises that the other three pairs of eyes in the room have fallen on her, all full of solemnity, she cowers back in her seat with an apologetic look crossing her face, realising that nobody is really in the mood to joke when there are the lives of a father and a brother at stake.

“And the Commander won’t help us,” Clarke adds dejectedly, slumping backwards in her seat, hating the feeling of helplessness that gnaws further at her insides with each second that passes knowing that her father is in the hands of such a terrible human being. If Nia can even be called a human being…

“I have an idea,” Raven ventures, the sound of her voice drawing Clarke out from the wealth of terrible thoughts about her father’s situation crossing her mind.

Seeing the way that Raven looks at her, teeth digging slightly into her lower lip, Clarke senses that it’s not all that Raven wants to say.

“But…?” she prompts Raven, gesturing with her hand for her to continue.

“But it’s highly impractical, completely dangerous,” explains Raven, ticking off each one on her fingers as she goes, before adding ominously, “not to mention _all_ kinds of illegal.”

Clarke thinks of her father - bound, gagged, and locked up deep in the bowels of a huge ship inhabited with a crew of pirates who could decide to kill him at any point - and sees the look on Octavia’s face, expectantly waiting for Clarke’s judgement knowing that she must be having exactly the same thoughts about her brother.

Clarke’s gaze moves from Octavia, anxiously perched on the edge of her seat, to Lincoln, still frowning deeply in the corner with no hints as to what he is thinking, and then back to Raven once more, whose eyes are wide in excited anticipation.

Clarke’s answer takes no thought at all.

“I’m in.”

* * *

Lexa recognises the ship approaching her own when it is still only a speck on the horizon, long before it is close enough for her to identify the captain at the helm.

The ship is bigger than Lexa’s, though only marginally, and not for reasons of fortune or status or even just practicality, but in a rather childish version of _mine is bigger than yours_ against Lexa that seems to have carried on into adulthood and captaincy. The hull is slightly wider, the masts slightly taller, and the figurehead at the stern is a trophy, stolen from the first ship the captain ever sunk.

In all, the incoming ship’s entire design is nothing more than an arrogant display of dominance.

Not that Lexa minds at all.

With the vast white canvas of the sails from all three masts arching proudly in the wind, the ship’s approach is a quick one, giving Lexa little time to prepare. She gives the orders to slow her own ship until only one of _Polis’_ huge white sails billows in the wind, and Aden knows her well enough that it takes nothing more than a nod of her head in his direction before he is scampering up the rigging to the crow’s nest, his telescope clipped to his belt in preparation.

As the ships draw alongside each other, Lexa stands tall, a hand firmly grasping one of the spokes of the wheel, her crew working tirelessly and without instruction around her to bring the vessel to a standstill. On the other ship, she can see the men hurrying around in similar fashion, and her eyes fall to the captain at the wheel, who raises a hand to tip the brim of her hat at Lexa when she sees her.

Lexa shakes her head almost imperceptibly, rolling her eyes at the woman she grew up with, her partner in crime since the tender age of five.

With both anchors dropped and a plank lowered between the two ships as a walkway, Lexa leaves the wheel to stand by the railing of her ship, just at the top of the stairs to the upper deck. She holds her head high, her hands clasped tightly behind her back so that her chest puffs out slightly. All eyes from both crews fall on the other captain as she slowly makes her way down from the helm of her own ship and across the thin walkway, the chunky heels of her worn leather boots thudding against the wood as she walks.

If it can even be called _walking_. Anya, ever the stereotypical pirate, approaches with much more of a swagger in her step.

Once on-board _Polis_ , Anya ascends the stairs to join Lexa on the upper deck and when she comes to a halt just a couple of feet from Lexa, she lifts her chin slightly, as if to emphasise the few inches of height she holds over the younger captain.

“ _Commander_ ,” Anya greets Lexa, the word laced with irony. Grasping her fingers around Lexa’s upper arm over her longcoat, Anya steers Lexa away towards the helm of the ship. “Let us talk.”

Lexa follows Anya obediently, dismissing the two deckhands working dutifully nearby so that they are the only two people on the upper part of the ship’s deck.

Now that they are alone and she doesn’t have to keep up feigned respect, Lexa settles back into more relaxed habits around one of her oldest friends and cuts straight to the point.

“Why are you here, Anya?”

“I can’t pay my baby sister a visit without having ulterior motives?” Anya teases, leaning against the railing at the helm with such confidence that one could almost assume that this is _her_ ship and not Lexa’s.

“You’re not my sister,” Lexa reminds her, arching one of her brows.

Anya’s eyes narrow, her head tilts slightly to the side in consideration, before she finally agrees, “Perhaps not in blood.”

The implication of Anya’s words gets Lexa’s mind whirring, glimpses of familiar memories flashing before her. Two girls, one small and one even smaller, running across the deck of a ship pretending to duel with wooden swords; a warm hand clasped tightly in hers as they both leap off a cliff into the warm Caribbean water; sitting side by side to watch the pretty yellows and oranges of a sunset spill across the sky from the crow’s nest after climbing the rigging for the very first time. Everything that Lexa would do with an older sister if she had one.

Lexa concedes with a small shrug. She might be stubborn, but Anya does have a point and Lexa isn’t going to tarnish their first meeting in months by squabbling over something so inconsequential.

Anya pushes herself off the railing and takes a couple of steps closer to Lexa. With a look of amused curiosity on her face, “So are you going to talk or am I going to have to pry it out of you?”

Lexa’s brain goes into panic mode, seeing the way that Anya looks at her knowingly and wondering what it is that she’s supposedly done this time. She knows that look – it’s the look of a person who knows something that she shouldn’t, and it’s coming from the woman who has an inexplicable talent for being able to coerce _anything_ from Lexa.

“Talk about what?” Lexa asks, trying to pretend that everything is okay (everything _is_ okay, as far as she is aware) even though her voice betrays her anxiety by not being as steady as it should be.

With an eye roll so dramatic that it could probably change the direction of the wind, Anya sighs, “About Nia, what else?”

Realising that Anya isn’t about to express her disappointment at Lexa’s personal life or scrutinise Lexa for the way that she conducts herself as a captain, as is usually the case when Anya has a bone to pick with her, Lexa relaxes a little bit internally. On the outside, however, she stiffens, back straightening to improve her posture and arms folded behind her back, her hands tightly clasping the opposite elbow.

“There’s not much to say,” Lexa tells Anya, though the way that she can’t actually meet Anya’s gaze with her own is as sure of a giveaway than any of her untruthfulness.

“Oh, don’t give me that bullsh-“

“Let me rephrase,” Lexa interrupts, shooting Anya a glare to assert her authority over the older pirate captain. When it becomes obvious that Anya is not going to protest, Lexa relaxes just a touch, and then continues in a lighter mood, “I can think of several words to describe Nia but I’m not willing to say any of them aloud.”

“Go on,” Anya prompts her, eyes alight with mischief. “Tell me.” When Lexa makes no move to elaborate, Anya starts throwing out suggestions, each more even more lewd than the one before. “Whore? Cock-sucker? Cun-“

“ _Anya_!” Lexa interrupts the other captain in horror mid-word, though the horror is less at Anya’s foul language and more because of how good Anya is at reading Lexa’s mind, even when the two women haven’t seen each other for months. Anya’s suggestions of names to call Nia are so alarmingly similar to the ones that were running through Lexa’s mind that it’s hardly a surprise that the pair of them grew up together.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Anya asks cockily, one hand coming up to rest on the hilt of her sword at her hip and her feet spaced quite wide apart in a stance of dominance.

Not making any effort to disguise the fact that she is blatantly ignoring Anya’s question, Lexa continues, “Listen, what Nia is up to is none of our business.”

The smirk drops off Anya’s face in an instant, her eyes blinking widely as she processes Lexa’s words.

“What?” she asks, both surprised and confused. “You’re _not_ going after her?”

It’s Lexa’s turn to be confused. She’s captained her own ship since the age of sixteen, four years spent building up and cultivating a reputation for herself amongst the Caribbean waters, and she’s quite frankly outraged that somebody who knows her as well as Anya could possibly think she would go after Nia.

“Of course not!” Lexa objects loudly, scowling at Anya to make her feelings quite clear.

“Then why the hell not?” Anya challenges her.

Lexa is even more confused than before. One moment Anya seems to be reprimanding her for going after Nia, and then she’s apparently disappointed when she learns Lexa is doing no such thing.

“Why would you think that I’m doing that?” Lexa asks, lowering her voice because she’s becoming quite aware that their heated debate is drawing the attention of quite a few of Lexa’s crew members. She shakes her head at Anya in disbelief.

“An associate of mine overheard you and Lincoln talking in Nassau the other night,” Anya says, backing down so that both her voice and her stance are slightly less aggressive.

“Lincoln asked for my help taking down Nia,” clarifies Lexa. “I said no.”

“Lincoln wants to go after her?” Anya asks, crinkling her nose and wincing as if the very thought is leaving a bitter taste in her mouth. She shakes her head disapprovingly, then says bitterly, “I thought that spineless little rat vowed to stay away from piracy after he nearly got himself hung last year.”

Lexa shrugs disinterestedly, then answers, “What Lincoln does is no business of mine.” Anya raises an eyebrow at Lexa expectantly, and after a few moments of silent staring between the two women, Lexa concedes and explains, “He’s got a couple of friends who have relatives that were captured from the ship that Nia sunk the other day. They want to launch a rescue mission and Lincoln asked for my help. Naturally I refused.”

Anya frowns, deep in thought about what Lexa is telling her, then lets out a heavy sigh.

“So what do we do?”

The answer already prepared on the tip of her tongue, Lexa says, “We do nothing. When Nia is sinking trading ships she is none of my concern.”

“Lincoln can’t be stupid enough to allow his friends go after Nia on their own, can he?” Anya asks, showing concern for what is perhaps the first time since her arrival on Lexa’s ship.

Lexa shakes her head. She needs no imagination whatsoever to picture how that particular scenario would go down – the ship would end up at the bottom of the ocean and its crew would have no chance at survival, yet more dead bodies floating on the surface of the Caribbean Sea on Nia’s orders.

Including the persistent blonde eavesdropper who has been plaguing Lexa’s mind since their meeting in the most maddening of ways.

* * *

The wind rushing through her hair as they sail out of Nassau, the small coastal town gradually becoming smaller and smaller until the different buildings are indistinguishable from each other, is honestly one of the best things that Clarke has ever felt. She’s been aboard this ship for a grand total of about ten minutes but she already sees the appeal in sailing, she understands why her father loves going out to sea so much when he could take a job in the town that would allow him to stay at home with his wife and daughter. It’s incredibly liberating, clear blue ocean stretching out before them as far as the eye can see and knowing that there’s an entire world out there to be explored.

Once again donning her clothes from the other night - dark britches, an oversized white shirt that billows in the breeze, heavy boots with chunky soles – Clarke feels like she’s dressed for the part, like she belongs here on the deck of the large frigate that Raven has somehow managed to acquire for their adventure.

“Do I even want to know where this ship came from?” Clarke muses aloud, raising her voice enough that Raven, who stands a few feet away with her hands on her hips and a huge smile on her face, can hear her over the sound of the wind.

“It belongs to a man I know,” Raven answers, turning her head to grin wickedly at Clarke. “He’s…” Raven trails off with a frown, pausing to select the right words, before continuing, “He’s incapacitated at the moment. He doesn’t need it.”

Concealing her alarm, Clarke sees right through Raven’s clever words and asks bluntly, “Is he dead or imprisoned?”

Scowling at the fact that Clarke has read her so easily, Raven answers, “He’s locked in a cell in the fortress and not getting out any time soon. He won’t even notice that she’s missing.”

Clarke isn’t entirely satisfied with Raven’s answer, though she can’t really argue when they would otherwise be setting out on this mission in Lincoln’s small fishing boat, hardly the right vessel to chase after one of the region’s deadliest pirates.

“Is that the illegal part of this rescue mission over and done?”

Raven hobbles over to Clarke and rests a hand on Clarke’s upper arm, just above the bend in her elbow, a smirk etched on her face.

“Clarke, _darling_ ,” she says, her voice laced with sarcasm as she places an exaggerated emphasis on the pet name. “We’re sailing a stolen ship to god knows where with a crew that has virtually no experience of sailing a ship anywhere near this size towards almost certain death at the hands of a terrible pirate who sinks naval ships for fun. I think whether or not what we’re doing is legal is the least of our worries.”

Clarke knows that Raven is just messing around but there’s a chilling amount of truth to her words. At the very core of it, they _don’t_ know what they’re doing or where they’re going or even the scale of what they might be up against if they do by some miracle manage to work out where to find Captain Nia. They are nothing more than a crew of inexperienced sailors, mostly made up of a few of Clarke’s childhood friends mixed with a few unemployed acquaintances of Raven’s with varying degrees of sobriety, all of whom Clarke has decided that it’s best left unanswered how exactly Raven might know them. They are a mismatched crew with limited sailing experience, bar Lincoln, setting sail into unfamiliar territory to look for a pirate who could, quite honestly, be hiding anywhere in the Caribbean.

And only when she puts it like that does Clarke begin to doubt that what they’re doing is sensible at all.

“Are we doing the right thing?” Clarke voices her concerns aloud, panic bubbling deep within her as she begins to imagine just a few of the many terrible ways they could meet their demise during this voyage.

“Would we be doing the right thing by twiddling our thumbs in Nassau while waiting for Jake to pull off a miraculous escape and return home?” Raven bounces a second question right back at Clarke.

“No,” Clarke answers, knowing with absolute certainty that she is telling the truth, though that doesn’t mean that what they are doing is right.

“Then we’re doing the right thing,” Raven tells her, her voice full of the kind of conviction that Clarke needs to stop herself from calling off this entire mission and turning the boat around.

Clarke takes a few steps forward until she is standing by the railing at the side of the ship. Resting her arms on the wooden balustrade and leaning most of her weight on it, she takes in the view that stretches out before her, a wide expanse of blue in every direction except for behind, where the island becomes smaller and smaller. Below her, the water crashes against the side of the ship as they cut through the water, tossing up a fine spray of cool saltwater.

When Raven joins her a few seconds later, wooden leg clunking against the deck as she walks, Clarke lets out a defeated sigh, the enormity of their situation still just beginning to settle in.

“I still can’t believe that Lexa wouldn’t help us,” she complains aloud.

She should know better than to expect any kind of sympathy from Raven, and indeed when the other girl does respond, it isn’t words of consolation or reassurance that leave her lips, but a single word, full of highly suggestive teasing.

“ _Lexa_?”

Clarke nudges Raven with her elbow, not hard enough to leave a bruise but enough to induce a sharp hiss of pain.

“Shut up,” Clarke admonishes her.

The warning doesn’t stop Raven.

“Come on, Clarke,” Raven continues to tease, leaning her body in slightly closer to Clarke. “Tell me you weren’t a little bit attracted to the Commander when she pinned you against a wall. Tell me you didn’t want her to _command_ you.”

“Raven,” Clarke snaps, her voice deadly serious as she reprimands her best friend. Raven turns solemn immediately, the usually teasing nature of their relationship meaning that it becomes apparent very quickly when one of them becomes upset or angry. “My father has been kidnapped by an evil pirate queen and you’re honestly asking me if I’m attracted to the woman who refused to help us save him?”

“I’m sorry,” Raven says, hanging her head in shame. “I was just trying to lighten the mood. Everything is so gloomy around here.”

Raven reaches her arm out and lays a hand on top of Clarke’s own, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze in both a plea for forgiveness and a reminder that she’s not going to be leaving Clarke any time soon.

Her voice much quieter than before, much more pensive, Clarke lets the silence around them settle, then says, “Thank you.”

“For being a terrible best friend?”

Her hand still underneath Raven’s, Clarke turns up upside down so that their palms connect, and interlaces their fingers in a gesture that means so much with such a difficult journey ahead of them.

“For being a great best friend by acquiring this ship so we can save my father.”

The serious part of the conversation over, Raven leans across to rest her head against Clarke’s, giving her hand another squeeze, before she mumbles jovially, “Anything for Papa G.”


	5. Chapter 5

Lexa first spots the ship a few hours out of Nassau, an inconsequential black dot on the horizon that requires no more of her attention that any of the other neutral ships that she passes on a day to day basis. She ignores it and carries on with her duties as a captain.

The ship catches her attention a few hours later, now close enough for Lexa to be able to look at it through a telescope and discern some of its features. It’s a fairly big ship, a frigate with a wide hull and three towering masts, but from what Lexa can see through her looking glass, the crew is extremely small for a ship of its size, just a few tiny specks milling around on its deck.

Curiosity overwhelms Lexa – it’s not like she has any other plans at the moment other than to patrol the waters between Nassau and the northern coast of Cuba - and as the ship isn’t sailing under any flag, suggesting pirates, she decides to tail it to find out more.

Which is how she finds herself, a day and a half later and on the other side of a small storm, though still in much the same kind of waters, still following the ship but without much more of an idea who it belongs to or where they are going.

“They’re sailing like complete imbeciles,” Lexa shakes her head as the mainsail of the ship in the distance gets lowered, then raised, and then lowered again in the space of less than a minute. “They’ve been sailing around in a giant circle for a day and a half.”

Indra, Lexa’s first mate and most loyal of crew members, shakes her head and lets out a disgruntled huff of breath.

“Is Aden still keeping watch like I asked him to?” Lexa asks Indra.

“Yes, captain.”

Lexa uses a tiny flick of her head to gesture for Indra to take over the wheel. Stepping slightly to the side and cupping her hands around her mouth to amplify the sound, she bellows out a single word from deep within her lungs, the sound cutting through the air.

“Aden!”

A tiny blonde head emerges over the side of the crow’s nest, looking down at his captain, and Lexa raises a hand to beckon for him to come down.

Aden’s descent is a quick one. He’s been on this ship since he was a very young boy, trained by Lexa’s side since he was old enough to hold a sword, and his years of experience working on ship shows as he clambers down the rigging, almost monkey-like in his movements.

“Yes, captain?” he calls up to Lexa at the helm after he lands on the lower deck with the smallest of thuds.

“Tell me what you have seen.”

Aden runs up the stairs to the upper deck with as much energy as he would have if he hadn’t just made the strenuous climb down from the crow’s nest and salutes his captain obediently before giving his report.

“They’re not pirates,” he tells her, “but that’s all I can tell. Most likely not fishermen because they haven’t stopped for a catch yet. A trading boat perhaps.”

Lexa shakes her head slowly, dissatisfied with Aden’s suggestion.

“I don’t think so. They’re inexperienced sailors - that much I can tell from here. What have you seen of the crew?”

“There aren’t many of them,” recalls Aden. “There’s currently a woman at the helm. Dark hair, tanned skin, wooden leg.”

Not recognising the woman from Aden’s description, Lexa holds out her hand and says, “Give me that telescope.”

Accepting the telescope from Aden, Lexa raises it to her eyes and focuses it on the ship in the distance. They are close enough now that she can make out the individual crew members, just a few of them moving around on the deck. Just as Aden stated, the person stationed at the wheel is a woman, dark hair pushed back into a loose ponytail, leaning quite obviously on one good leg while the other shows a carved wooden peg emerging from the knee of her dark breeches. Though a small leather hat sits on top of her head to keep the sun out of her eyes, she is dressed just as the rest of her crew and Lexa is almost certain that this girl is not the captain.

Lexa turns her head slightly, scanning the other visible members of the crew for either a captain or for some indication of the purpose of this ship, and to her complete surprise, she spots a familiar figure climbing the stairs to the helm. An unpleasant chill slowly trickles down Lexa’s spine from her hairline on the back of her neck to the base of her back.

“It’s that damn girl again!” Lexa fumes, keeping the telescope firmly against the socket of her eye as she watches the blonde eavesdropper from the tavern in Nassau take up position beside the dark-haired girl at the wheel. “She’s going to lead them all straight to their deaths!”

Lowering the telescope, Lexa steps forward to the railing that overlooks the ship’s main deck and barks out an order to the crew that work dutifully below.

“Make full sail towards that ship!”

From the wheel behind her, Indra’s voice pipes up in concern.

“Captain, what are you doing?”

Lexa turns around swiftly, her coat sweeping around her ankles as she strides back over to where Indra and Aden stand.

“Saving their lives,” she answers simply, her forehead creased in a concentrated frown.

“But you said it yourself,” Indra reminds her, a pleading edge to her voice. “They’re just idiots.”

“Idiots that are going to make my life a hell of a lot harder if Nia catches up to them.” When Indra’s expression remains blank, Lexa elaborates, “They’re looking for her. If they find her, she’ll kill them, but if she finds them first…”

Lexa trails off, shaking her head gently and not even wanting to imagine the kind of fate that the blonde girl and her incompetent crew could meet if Nia learns about them, the very thought of her archenemy bringing back painful memories that are just as raw now as they were two years ago.

“Enough!” Lexa raises her voice, and though she says it more to stop the dreadful thoughts that threaten to plague her mind, it does the job of startling Indra into silence too. “We sail after them.”

* * *

When she climbs the stairs to the helm, Clarke doesn’t expect Raven to greet her with an immediate burden of bad news.

“We’re being followed,” Raven tells Clarke.

Having taken an exhausting overnight shift at the helm to steer them through the outskirts of a storm, Lincoln, possibly the only one who can have any idea what to do in this situation to evade the ship that gains distance on them from behind, is fast asleep in a hammock two floors below them.

“Pirates?” Clarke asks fearfully, certain that she already knows that answer to that particular question.

“Pirates,” Raven nods in confirmation. “I’ve got Jasper up in the crow’s nest to keep an eye on them but I can see from here that they’re catching up with us. It won’t be long before they draw alongside us.”

Clarke glances over her shoulder at the ominous presence of the ship not too far behind them, both an impressive and a fear-inducing sight with its white sails all arched from the mast as the ships sails at its maximum speed.

“How do you know they’re tailing us?” Clarke questions Raven, not yet willing to quell the last morsels of hope from deep within. “They could just be sailing in this direction, same as us.”

“I’m pretty certain that I saw the same ship not too far behind us a couple of days ago.”

“Which means that they followed us through the storm,” Clarke concludes depressingly. She lets out a long groan and then turns to look at Raven again. “We’re going to die, aren’t we?”

Raven shakes her head entirely unconvincingly.

“The best case scenario is that they jump on board and steal the rest of our food supply, forcing us to stop at the nearest port to restock,” she tells Clarke.

“And the worst case scenario?” Clarke dares to ask, fairly certain that she doesn’t want to know that answer but deciding to ask anyway.

“They jump on board and kill us one at a time, long and slow and painful.”

Clarke grimaces at Raven’s words, concluding rather suddenly that dying as a result of cannon fire destroying the ship sounds more pleasant that Raven’s option. Her eyes widen as the thought crosses her mind – never did she think that she would be working out which cause of death at the hand of pirates would be the most preferable.

“Give me your telescope,” Clarke says to Raven, extending a hand with an open palm. “Let me at least take a look at their crew. We can plan our course of action.”

The fingers of one hand remaining firmly clasped around a spoke of the ship’s wheel, Raven reaches for her belt with the other and extracts the brass telescope from its leather pouch. She offers it out to Clarke, who extends it out to its maximum magnification and raises it to her eye.

“There’s a lot of them,” Clarke admits, her heart sinking as she scans the deck of the boat and sees it swarming with men. “At least twice as many as we’ve got, maybe more, and that’s just on the deck.”

She changes the positioning of the telescope, scanning around blindly for a couple of seconds until she finally manages to focus on the helm, where a young blonde boy and a heavily armoured woman with a steely frown stand on either side of…

“Wait! It’s _her_!” Clarke hisses angrily, glaring even through the telescope at the familiar face of the pirate with whom Clarke had an encounter in the dark alleys of Nassau, “The Commander!”

Raven’s head jerks up at Clarke’s words, a quizzical frown on her face.

“Seriously?” she asks, as if she doesn’t quite believe what Clarke is saying.

“Yes!” Clarke insists. Lowering the telescope from her eye and turning back to Raven, Clarke continues demandingly, “Drop anchor, now!”

Raven does her best to protest, keeping both hands on the wheel to keep the ship under control, even as she raises her voice at Clarke.

“Clarke, she held a knife to your throat!” Raven reminds her, shaking her head in a refusal to follow Clarke’s orders. “How do you know she isn’t going to kill all of us?”

“I just do, okay,” Clarke replies stubbornly, folding her arms across her chest with a glare on her face that she knows from experience rarely works on Raven, though she decides to try anyway.

“Clarke…” Raven whines, her eyes looking at Clarke with a look that says something along the lines of _are you seriously doing this right now?_

Clarke hasn’t yet decided what she’s going to do when Lexa does catch up to their ship. Having turned down a request for help once already, there’s no guarantee that she wouldn’t do exactly the same if Clarke were to ask her again – besides, two days out of Nassau, Clarke isn’t entirely sure that she either wants or needs Lexa’s help any more. Yet there is definitely something about the Commander that leaves Clarke feeling both unsettled and intrigued, and if Raven is right that Lexa has been tailing their ship for a while now, Clarke can’t help but be a little bit curious about what it is that she wants from Clarke.

“Raven,” Clarke pleads desperately. “She’s been following us for two days and she hasn’t killed us yet. Trust me, please.”

Clarke can see the doubt cross Raven’s face, but she also knows that Raven will give in eventually, just the same as Clarke would if it were Raven asking her a huge favour. It’s what best friends do.

Letting out a long sigh, Raven rolls her eyes and turns to look out over the deck of the ship before her, shouting out, “All hands on deck! We’re dropping anchor!”

Clarke walks over to Raven, reaching out with her hand to give Raven’s fingers a little squeeze of thanks where they curl around the spoke of the wheel, before she leaves to prepare for the incoming encounter with Captain Lexa Woods.

* * *

With the sails no longer carrying them across the ocean and the anchor tethered to the sea bed keeping them floating in the same place, the other ship catches up with them in a matter of minutes. It’s not really enough time for Clarke to collect her thoughts well enough to know exactly what she’s going to say to Lexa, but it doesn’t matter because Lexa is off on another rage-fuelled rant almost before her second foot has touched the deck of Clarke’s ship.

“You, again!” she roars at Clarke, striding over with two of her burliest men standing at each shoulder in a protective guard. “Did I not make myself clear when we met before?”

“You did,” Clarke answers, defiantly facing up to her with much more bravery than their encounter in the alleyway in Nassau, now that she knows that Lexa most likely isn’t looking to harm her. “You said that you wouldn’t help me rescue my father. So I found some people who would.”

The vein in Lexa’s temple throbs and her eyes widen for just the briefest moment,

“You’re going to get yourself killed. Who is your captain?”

Clarke considers the question thoughtfully because they’ve never actually formally appointed a captain. Lincoln, with the greatest knowledge and experience of sailing has unofficially taken charge of the practical side of this adventure, plotting out their course and doing much of the difficult work at the helm, with Raven and a couple of his own associates helping out when he needs a break. But Lincoln is currently asleep in the depths of the ship, and this is a mission to rescue _Clarke’s_ father – her ideas, her friends making up most of the crew, her rescue mission – so perhaps she’s technically in more control than Lincoln is.

“I am,” Clarke replies, with a hint of a challenge in her voice. She straightens her spine, pushing her shoulders back a little to puff out her chest, and lifts her chin to minimise the height difference between the two of them.

“Lies!” Lexa snarls at Clarke. “You’ve never sailed a ship before in your life!”

“We’ve got this far!” Clarke argues back, gesturing around them with her arms.

Lexa’s eye roll is so dramatic that Clarke wonders for a moment if it might actually capsize the ship.

“ _This far_ is barely out of Nassau,” she tells Clarke with a scalding tone. “You’ve been sailing in circles for days. You’re incompetent and a danger to the rest of us who sail these waters. I order you to return to Nassau at once.”

“No.”

Lexa’s eyes widen in surprise, almost as if she hadn’t doubted the fact that Clarke would submit and follow her orders. But Clarke isn’t one of Lexa’s crew, nor is she one of the many other crews that follow Lexa’s command, and she isn’t going to give up just because one pirate captain tells her to.

“I beg your pardon?” Lexa asks, her voice barely a growl.

“You’re not my captain,” Clarke reminds her, the very corners of her mouth pushing up into an impudent little smirk, “and you certainly aren’t my commander.”

Lexa takes a step closer to Clarke, squaring off against her with only a few inches between their faces. Clarke holds her gaze as determinedly as she can, her eyes flicking from left to right and back again between both of Lexa’s green orbs.

“Your insolence is going to get you into lots of trouble one day,” Lexa says, her voice barely audible but full of threatening undertones. “I just hope for both our sakes that you don’t find Nia.”

An idea pops into Clarke’s mind, an idea that is beyond stupid, but with nothing to lose and knowing that Lexa isn’t going to cause her any harm, she decides to voice it aloud anyway.

“If the way that my crew is sailing this ship offends you so much, why don’t you help us?” Clarke suggests, raising her eyebrows at Lexa. “We find Nia and rescue my father, and I promise I’ll return to Nassau and never set foot on a boat ever again.”

“Absolutely not,” Lexa shakes her head. “I told you last time, I’m not going anywhere near Nia.”

“Why not? Are you scared of her?” Clarke knows that she’s deliberately riling Lexa up, and she can tell that it’s working when Lexa’s shoulders stiffen and her jaw clenches in an attempt to ensure that she doesn’t lash out at Clarke. But Clarke decides to take it one step further, adding, “Maybe she should be the one everybody calls the Commander, not you.”

In the blink of an eye, Lexa steps forward and grabs Clarke by the collar of her shirt. Pulling so hard that Clarke actually worries that the fabric of the shirt might rip in the Commander’s fist, their faces are just inches apart as Lexa spits her next words at Clarke.

“Listen here, you stay far away from Nia. She _will_ kill you and it won’t be pretty.” As an afterthought, Lexa adds, “And stay away from me too.”

Clarke stumbles as Lexa releases her grip on Clarke’s shirt. Steadying her footing, Clarke straightens her ruffled clothing and then raises a single eyebrow at Lexa, Clarke says, “I’m not scared of Nia and I’m definitely not scared of you.”

“You should be,” Lexa snarls, before she turns on her heels and strides back to her own ship.

“Wow,” Octavia exhales, staring out at Lexa’s retreating back with a mildly impressed expression on her face. “She’s quite something.”

Clarke shakes her head. There’s just something about the Commander and her brief visit that unsettles Clarke deep within the pit of her stomach.

“I don’t know,” Clarke says, scowling after Lexa as the pirate captain returns to the helm of her ship and takes the wheel, bellowing instructions out to her crew as the ship slowly starts to drift away from their borrowed frigate. “I don’t understand her at all. She _has_ to have known that we wouldn’t just turn around and go back home again, not after all the effort we’ve put in to get here.”

Raven’s approach is signalled by the mismatched footsteps that get gradually closer behind them, the heavy thud of her boot alternating with the sound of her peg hitting the wooden boards of the deck.

“So I just had an interesting conversation with one of her crew,” Raven starts, a meaningful expression on her face as her eyes flit between Clarke and Octavia.

Her curiosity piqued, Clarke presses Raven for more.

“About what?”

“All it needed was a bit of my feminine charm and he told me exactly where Nia hides out,” Raven says, before continuing, her voice laced with meaning, “ _Isla de los Tormentos_.”

“Really?” Clarke’s eyes widen at this new piece of information. Though they are physically no closer to finding her father – Clarke’s knowledge of the geography of the Caribbean is basic at best and she’s never heard of this island before – having the name of a place where they might be able to find him fills Clarke with an invigorated sense of hope for their journey ahead. “Go and wake Lincoln. I need him to chart a route there at once.”

“Clarke,” Raven implores, resting a hand on Clarke’s arm as she looks at Clarke with a pleading expression on her face. “The island of torment. Are you sure?”

Clarke nods, not a shred of doubt in her mind. The name of Nia’s hideout does nothing to deter Clarke, nor does Lexa’s warning fresh in her mind about what Nia will do to them if she finds them before they find her. Clarke knows that this is what she must do – for her father’s sake.

“It’s where we’ll find Nia and it’s where we’ll find my dad and Octavia’s brother.”

Clarke’s words have the desired effect – Octavia nods determinedly beside her, then says, “I’ll wake Lincoln.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to derofeba for helping me to name the islan and for making sure that the Spanish is correct!


	6. Chapter 6

_Isla de los Tormentos_ looks just like any other small island in the Caribbean. A dense covering of trees shelters much of the island from view, with the exception of a sheer cliff face on the east side of the island, with a precarious overhang hundreds of feet above choppy water littered with deadly rocks that would sink any boat that gets caught on them.

Night falls shortly after they drop anchor not too far from the island, a thin white mist settling just above the surface of the ocean, not thick enough to obscure the island from view, but enough to create an eerie atmosphere that makes Clarke want to stay far away until the sun rises once more.

“Is that definitely Nia’s ship?”

With the shroud of mist hanging in the air, the ship anchored half behind the island is almost obscured from view, but that which is still visible is a fear inducing sight. The ship is monstrous in size, far bigger than anything Clarke has ever laid eyes on before, a hulking man-of-war with four bare masts that tower out of the mist and three rows of large cannons that jut out from small gaps in the side of the ship just visible through a looking glass.

“It has to be,” Clarke answers Octavia’s question.

She passes the telescope across to Lincoln, who raises it to his eye before confirming with a quick nod.

“I recognise the ship,” he tells them. “It’s her.”

Clarke shrugs simply.

“Then let’s go.”

* * *

After much deliberation back and forth between absolute stealth and taking a bit more manpower in case they encounter any problems, they eventually settle on a rescue party of just three. Clarke clambers into the tiny rowboat after Lincoln and Octavia, leaving Raven standing on the deck of their ship, peering wistfully over the railing.

“You can say it, you know,” Raven calls down to her as Lincoln picks up the pair of oars to balance the boat as Octavia and Clarke take their seats. “My leg will slow you down. I know that.”

“We need you here,” Clarke attempts to reason with her. “I don’t trust any of the others enough to keep the ship afloat while we’re gone.” Lincoln starts to paddle the boat away from the side of the ship with a few small strokes, turning the boat in the water so that they’re at the right angle to start rowing towards the island, and another thought crosses Clarke’s mind. Cupping her hands around her mouth to project her voice up to Raven as they start to drift away, she adds, “Leave if we’re not back in a couple of hours.”

“Clarke…” Raven groans, shaking her head slowly.

“I’m not getting you all killed,” Clarke protests. “Promise me that you’ll leave if it looks like we’re not coming back.”

After a few moments of deliberation, by which time Lincoln has start to paddle towards the island in earnest, Raven calls out after them, “I promise!”

* * *

They find a secluded section of beach to land their boat, jumping out of it the very second that they hit the sand and wordlessly hauling the rowboat between the three of them into the cover of bushes so that it won’t be found by any of Nia’s crew that might wander this way.

“Where are we going?” Clarke dares to whisper.

“Inland,” Lincoln replies immediately, drawing a small but deadly looking sword with a curved blade and a serrated edge from his belt, which he uses to point into the jungle. “It’s a small island, it shouldn’t be too hard to find them.”

They spread out to comb through the jungle, close enough to still be able to see each other through the trees but far enough away that if one of them gets caught, the other two should be able to remain unseen. Lincoln leads the way in the middle, cutting back bushes and thick vines with the blade in his hand, Clarke doing the same on his right and Octavia out of Clarke’s sight but no doubt doing the same on Lincoln’s left.

Just as Lincoln predicted, Nia’s camp isn’t hard to find. They spot the flickering of torches set high up on poles in the ground from quite a distance away, the orange glow of the flames visible even through the thick foliage a couple of minutes before they spot the first tent. Lincoln stops, beckoning for the two girls to come closer and join him, and the three of them crouch low in the bushes, assessing the situation before them.

Using the thick leaves around her as cover, Clarke lifts her head slightly to take in the small part of the camp she can see from here. She realises quickly that this rescue mission is going to be a lot harder than she initially thought; there are men everywhere, heavily armed with swords and pistols and rarely alone, collecting in groups of about two or three that will be extremely hard to overpower without alerting the whole camp to the presence of intruders, and the entire place is so well-lit with torches and campfires that it will be nearly impossible to sneak past without being noticed.

“We should scout around the perimeter,” Lincoln whispers. “Get our bearings, work out how many of them there are, see if we can spot your brother and father.”

Clarke nods obediently, leading the way through the bushes around the outskirts of the pirate camp, still crouched low and out of sight.

The camp is bigger than Clarke expected upon first seeing it, spread out across several clearings in the trees, though each is close enough that all it would take is a single cry out into the night for help and everybody on the island would be alerted to their presence. In the centre of the camp, just visible from the bushes on the north side, is a bigger tent heavily guarded by all of the most thuggish men.

Clarke pales when a single figure emerges from inside the tent, a woman with a scarred face and an ice cold gaze. The way she strides out towards the campfire, authority oozing from every step that she takes, means that Clarke would be able to recognise her as Nia from just a single glance even if she wasn’t wearing an extravagantly oversized captain’s hat on her head.

“That’s her, isn’t it?” Octavia says breathlessly, stopping right beside Clarke to peer through the shrubbery.

“I think so,” agrees Clarke. Slowly, so as to not cause enough movement to draw attention to herself, Clarke starts scanning the camp for her father, knowing that if Nia is here then he most likely can’t be too far away either.

Her visual search doesn’t get very far however, because after only a few second, fingers claps tightly around Clarke’s wrist like a pair of metal cuffs.

“It’s Bellamy!” Octavia hisses, pointing at a couple of pirates not too far away from the trio that crouch concealed in the bushes.

Without even thinking of the fact that it might blow their cover, Octavia moves as if to stand at her full height and leave the cover of the bushes, mind set on nothing but the fact that her brother is no more than about twenty feet away, sitting on a chunky log with one other pirate at a nearby campfire.

“Stop!” Lincoln warns her, dragging her back down into their leafy cover with a pair of strong arms, which Octavia struggles against for a few seconds, before falling still. “We need to figure out how to get to him without being seen.”

Clarke frowns at the man who must be Octavia’s brother; tall, dark-haired, and with a smattering of unshaven stubble covering his chin and upper neck. There’s no sign that he’s a prisoner of this camp, his clothing the same kind of tattered shirt and dark trousers that everybody else wears, no bounds keeping him in place, and a small knife clipped to his belt. In fact, it is almost as if he is one of the crew and not a hostage.

“Are you sure that’s him?” Clarke asks.

“Do you think I don’t know my own brother?” Octavia demands, a fierce expression on her face as she glares at Clarke, Lincoln’s arms still wrapped around her from behind to stop her from running off.

“Sorry,” Clarke lowers her eyes apologetically. “He’s not tied up, that’s all.”

“Nia will have given them all an ultimatum,” Lincoln explains. “Join her or die.”

From next to Clarke, Octavia mutters quietly under her breath, “I know which I’d choose.”

“Exactly,” Lincoln agrees. “Most of the pirates under Nia’s command are only there because they’re scared what will happen to them if they go against her.”

Clarke raises her eyebrows at this new piece of information and files it away safely in the back of her mind, just in case it comes in handy later on. It’s certainly interesting to find out that not all of the men here guarding the camp are here by choice, and certainly one that could play into their hands later if things start to go wrong.

“We need a plan,” Lincoln whispers, his eyebrows knit together in a tight frown as he considers their options. “You girls should stay here and keep an eye on Bellamy. I’ll finish scouting the perimeter to see how many more men Nia has got. Maybe there’s something in the camp we can use to help us, a weakness in their defences or perhaps a distraction.”

“I should come with you,” Clarke insists. “We still need to locate my father. I’m not leaving this island without him.”

Lincoln’s eyes flicker down to Octavia, who is still standing close to him, even though he has relinquished his hold on her. Clarke doesn’t need psychic powers to know what Lincoln is thinking – leaving Octavia on her own in such close proximity to her captured brother sounds like the most reliable way for Octavia to do something stupid to get herself apprehended and killed while they are gone.

Octavia releases a heavy sigh of impatience as she realises the silent conversation that Lincoln and Clarke are having through the meaningful eye contact that they share.

“You can leave me alone,” she tells them, her voice a loud whisper in her irritation at their wariness. “I’m not a child. I can be trusted not to get myself caught.”

His expression torn, Lincoln looks down at Octavia with mixed concern and trust. In a move that surprises Clarke completely, stunning her into stillness but for her mouth, which slowly drops open, Lincoln reaches tenderly to cup Octavia’s cheek in his giant hand.

Clarke has seen these two interact on the ship, but never like this. She knows that they are close but always just assumed that it was purely an extension of Octavia being grateful to Lincoln for saving her life on the beach back in Nassau. Clarke never would have guessed that there was something more going on. Clarke stares for a few seconds, shocked by what she sees, before she forces herself to pry her eyes away from the pair, feeling a little as though she is intruding on what is supposed to be a private moment.

In turning away from Lincoln and Octavia, Clarke’s eyes fall once more on Bellamy, whose grubby face and tousled hair is illuminated by the orange glow of the firelight. An idea pops into her mind so suddenly that she completely forgets that she is trying to let her two companions have a few seconds to themselves, tugging on Lincoln’s sleeve to silently get his attention.

“I have a plan,” Clarke hisses excitedly, and both pairs of eyes fall on her once more. Pointing over her shoulder with her thumb, she continues, “Bellamy is right over there. If we can get him over here without alerting any of the others to our presence, we can use him to find my father.”

Octavia’s eyes light up in enthusiasm.

“Yes, Clarke!” she nods rapidly in agreement. “Bellamy will know where your father is. We can send him back into camp to fetch him and nobody will have any idea that the three of us are here to help them escape. It’s perfect!”

“Now we just need to figure out how to get Bellamy to…”

Clarke is just mentally trying to devise the best plan to get Bellamy on his own, when by a stroke of pure luck that can only have come from some higher power trying to help them, Bellamy gets to his feet of his own accord, saying something unintelligible to the other pirate near him before traipsing off into the bushes not too far away from where the three of them hide in the dense undergrowth. It quickly becomes apparent why, when he comes to a halt next to a tree and stands with his back to the camp, urinating into the bushes.

“Bellamy!”

Octavia is off like a shot almost the very second that Bellamy is alone and out of sight of the rest of Nia’s camp, too fast for Lincoln to even attempt to hold her back, darting through the bushes with surprising agility and hissing her brother’s name through the darkness. He doesn’t hear her at first, too busy taking care of business, but when Octavia gets close enough for him to hear the rustling of leaves, he turns around in an instant, hastily tucking himself back into his trousers with one hand while the other goes for the knife at his belt.

“Bellamy, it’s me.”

Still crouching low in the bushes, Clarke watches from a few metres away as Bellamy’s face turns from one of a man who thinks he’s in immediate danger, to one of utter surprise as he sees his sister hurtling towards him through the jungle. Octavia reaches him before he even has a chance to fully register the sight before him, flinging her arms around his neck in an embrace so tight that it looks like she could choke him.

“What are you doing here?” Bellamy asks his sister, the expression on his face one of stunned surprise as he dazedly brings his arms up to return Octavia’s hug. “I thought you were dead.”

Taking a quick glance over her shoulder to check that they haven’t been seen, Clarke hurries over to the siblings as stealthily as possible with Lincoln at her heels, not wanting to interrupt their happy reunion but knowing that they don’t have much time to carry out the rest of this operation undetected.

“You can catch up with each other later,” Clarke tells them reluctantly, nodding her head in the direction of the campfire not too far away from where the three of them stand to remind them of where they are. “We still need to find my father.” Turning her attention to Bellamy, Clarke holds out a hand to introduce herself. “Hello, you must be Bellamy. My name is Clarke. Clarke Griffin.”

Bellamy’s eyes widen in recognition as Clarke tells him her full name, his face paling slightly and his mouth dropping open just a fraction.

“Jake’s daughter.”

It’s phrased as a statement and not a question, like Bellamy already knows the answer, but Clarke nods anyway, eager for his help locating and rescuing her father.

“Do you know where he is?” Clarke presses him, feeling the way that her heart suddenly picks up its pace in her chest, hammering against her ribcage as if it’s trying to burst right out of her chest to find her father itself.

“I’m so sorry.”

It’s like her heart stops beating the very second that the words spill from Bellamy’s chest, like an ice cold bucket of water has been poured over her head, trickling down her spine and numbing every sense in her body. She can’t focus on anything except for the way that Bellamy stares at her with an expression full of pity, not even the steady in and out of air into her lungs. Those three words tell her practically nothing and yet she still knows why they were said to her, she still knows what is coming next.

“Why?” she gasps out, though she doesn’t really know how her brain manages to function enough to tell her mouth to utter even that one word.

“Jake, he …” Bellamy pauses and shakes his head in a doleful apology, hanging his head to avoid having to look Clarke directly in the eyes. “He didn’t make it out of the ship alive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Six chapters in and I feel like the story is just starting to get going. In the next few chapters we'll see Clarke and Lexa interacting a lot more and getting to know each other a bit - I hope you're as excited as I am to see how it plays out and how their relationship develops.
> 
> As always, let me know what you think! Comments are much appreciated and keep me motivated!


	7. Chapter 7

Lexa loses count of just how many curse words she utters under her breath after the first thirty seconds of hiking through the thick undergrowth.

The island is one that Lexa is familiar with but has never visited in person before. She’s seen it from a distance, safe on the deck of her own ship as she conducts scouting missions to learn more about her enemy; she’s heard tales about it from other pirates, former members of Nia’s crew that Lexa has persuaded to join her own side and rare prisoners that have been lucky to escape the island with their own lives. Lexa never planned to actually visit the island herself, least of all under these circumstances.

She’s already reprimanded the man who let slip to one of the Girl’s crew members exactly where Nia hides out when she’s not causing terror across the Caribbean Sea, and he can sure as hell expect that she’s not done with him when she returns to her ship. She had been counting on the Girl and her crew sailing blindly around the ocean for another week, maybe two, before running out of supplies and heading back to Nassau. What she had not planned for, is an impromptu mission to rescue a hot-headed girl and her imbecilic crew who seem oblivious to the dangers that can be found in the world of piracy.

“Jesus Christ,” Lexa mutters under her breath for what is quite possibly the hundredth time. “I’m going to fucking kill her myself when I catch up to her.”

Lexa is glad that she’s decided to undertake this particular venture onto _Isla de los Tormentos_ alone. Of course it would certainly help to have a couple of other capable swordsmen at her side should she run into any danger, but she can already hear Indra’s voice in the back of her head telling her what a stupid idea this is, how she should leave the Girl to die and go on pretending that Nia isn’t terrorising the pirate community, and having the real thing by her side would drive Lexa mad. Besides, Lexa isn’t planning on running into danger.

She doesn’t really know why she made the decision to follow the Girl and her crew to _Isla de los Tormentos_. As much as she hates to admit it, the voice of Indra in her head is a voice of reason, and there is absolutely no doubt that what she is doing right now is most likely the stupidest thing she’s done since long before she became the captain of her own ship. It’s not just a plan that could get Lexa killed, but a plan that could get her captured, tortured, and _then_ killed in the most brutally drawn-out of ways at the hands of her archenemy.

Not exactly the way that Lexa would hope it all to end.

But there is just something about this girl that makes Lexa feel compelled to stop her from blundering stupidly towards her own death. And it frustrates the hell out of Lexa that she can’t pinpoint exactly what it is.

 _The Girl_. That’s what Lexa’s been calling her in her head ever since first becoming acquainted with her in the alleyway back in Nassau. No, before that, in fact. Lexa remembers back to when her eyes first fell on the Girl in the tavern, before she even knew that Lincoln’s proposition was going to involve her, before she knew that their lives would become intertwined in the way that they have. It’s all she has to go on, she doesn’t even know her name yet.

Lexa can count everything she knows about the Girl on a single hand. One; she lives in Nassau. Two; she somehow knows Lincoln. Three; she has a father who works for a widely respected trading company. Four; she’s the most stubborn person that Lexa has _ever_ met. And five; Lexa can’t get her out of her fucking mind.

The Girl should be nothing more than a pain in Lexa’s arse. And yet…

“And yet here I am, rushing in to save her from almost certain death,” Lexa finishes aloud, accompanying the words with a roll of her eyes.

Lexa has never made a decision as impulsive as the one to venture onto _Isla de los Tormentos_ alone to rescue the Girl – as Commander of so many pirate crews in the Caribbean she prides herself on making rational decisions for the good of her people. It’s only when Lexa catches sight of Nia’s camp for the first time through the thick jungle that she starts to properly doubt herself and what she’s doing.

The camp is swarming with pirates everywhere that Lexa looks. They sit around small bonfires and patrol the settlement in pairs, all armed heavily with knives and pistols. There is no doubt in Lexa’s mind that pulling off an escape after being spotted would be nothing short of miraculous – she’s more than handy with a sword, but there’s a limit to how many men even she can overcome at once.

Here, crouched in the undergrowth in the shadowy outskirts of the camp, Lexa is safe. But she knows that the moment she moves in, the moment she tries to infiltrate the camp in attempt to locate The Girl and her companions, the danger of her own life will increase at least tenfold.

Which is why it is all the more important to find The Girl and get her off this island as soon as she can.

She’s dropped the usual longcoat and tricorne hat, knowing that both will just slow her down and make it harder for her to stay stealthy. She’s no less armed than usual, however. Her pair of lightweight swords are strapped to her hips, and she keeps one hand on the handle of one of them at all times, ready to draw it. As Lexa skulks silently through the jungle, keeping all of her senses hyperaware of her surroundings, she mentally goes over where the rest of her weapons are kept; the pistol holstered at her belt, the knife strapped to her left calf beneath her britches, the two small explosive shells concealed in a pouch beneath the baggy material of her tattered shirt.

Lexa is as prepared as she could possibly be, but that doesn’t stop her heart from pounding against her ribcage like the rhythmic thud of a thousand angry war drums playing in unison.

There’s a scuffle to Lexa’s left, a rustling of leaves and the sound of hushed voices. Lexa drops as low as she can, withdrawing one of her swords from its scabbard as she skulks through the jungle as stealthily as she can to investigate the sound.

The first thing that Lexa sees is the back of a man’s head covered in dark curly hair and she continues to approach in caution, but her next step closer, sidestepping a tree that was obstructing her view, reveals three more people. Lexa’s eyes move from a girl whose face seems vaguely familiar, then widen when she notices Lincoln, and then…

Lexa finally notice the fourth person, and then immediately wonders why she wasn’t the first person that her eyes were drawn to when it is the very same person that she ventured on the island to look for. Yet the Girl is behaving unlike Lexa has ever seen her before, struggling against Lincoln and the other man as they each take a firm grip on one of her arms, stopping her from running off into the centre of the dangerous and well-armed pirate camp. The Girl talks as she fights their grasp, a tearful and breathless mantra of “No” and “Let me go” and “I’m going to kill her.”

Lexa doesn’t need to ask who the “her” in question is, and her eyes clicker across to where she can just see Captain Nia in the distance, surrounded by heavily armed guards.

With all the commotion, it’s a wonder that the Girl hasn’t yet attracted the attention of any one of the men that occupy the camp that must be close enough to be within earshot. Lexa doesn’t even think twice before her next action – she knows that the Girl needs to be silent immediately if they are to remain undetected and so she goes against all her training by dropping her sword to the ground, then surges through the bushes as fast as she can to approach the writhing girl from behind.

It all happens in an instant. Lexa wraps both arms around the Girl from behind, clapping one over her mouth to muffle her yelp of surprise at being accosted, and hooking her other arm around the Girl’s neck from behind in a tight headlock that applies pressure to her airway.

“Hey!” the curly-haired man protests when he notices Lexa’s arrival and the grasp she has around the Girl’s neck, his voice louder than necessary. “What are you…?

“Shhh!” Lexa hisses, just as Lincoln holds up a hand and shakes his head at the man to indicate that there is nothing to worry about.

The Girl writhes and struggles in Lexa’s arms for a few more seconds, her desperate cries for help muffled against the flat palm of Lexa’s hand over her mouth, then falls limp against Lexa’s body. Readjusting the unconscious body in her arms, Lexa manoeuvres one of her hands and uses her fingers to feel around on the Girl’s neck until she finds a pulse beneath the skin.

“She’s out,” Lexa informs the group. “We don’t have long until she wakes up. We need to get off the island before that happens or we’re all dead. It’s a miracle that you haven’t been caught already.”

Lexa glares at Lincoln with this last comment, knowing that out of the four people in the other party, he should have known better than to launch a raid on Nia’s island.

As if to prove Lexa’s point, a man’s voice calls out through the jungle from the direction of the camp.

“Over here! I’m sure I heard a noise from over by that tree!”

Lexa doesn’t think twice as she effortlessly scoops up the unconscious blonde in her arms and takes a couple of steps away from the camp through the undergrowth as fast as she can, a feat which is a lot harder as she tries to maintain a crouched position with an extra body cradled in her arms.

“I’ll go and create a distraction,” says Lincoln’s gruff voice. “I’ll give you time to get away.”

“Lincoln, no!” protests the dark-haired girl.

Lexa nods once in Lincoln’s direction, before she turns her attention to the protesting girl, whose face is contorted into an expression of anguish.

“You have to let him do this,” Lexa implores. “We need to go before they find us.”

Lincoln reaches out with one of his hands and cups the dark-haired girl’s jaw to press a lingering kiss to her, then he races out around the outskirts of the camp with far more stealth than somebody of his build should be able to.

“Who’s there?”

As Lincoln departs, they are reminded of why he has to leave as one of the men from Nia’s camp calls out into the jungle where they hide. Lexa’s heart picks up its pace hammering against her chest as she realises that they are only a few seconds from being discovered.

The other man in their small group, the curly-haired one that Lexa doesn’t know, holds up one of his hands and says, “I’ve got this. I know them.”

The man emerges from his leafy cover with his hands raised, approaching Nia’s men with his hands raised in surrender.

“It’s just me,” he tells the men. “I was taking a leak.”

 _BANG_.

An explosion so loud that it seems to rock the entire island erupts in orange flames to their left. There is no doubt in Lexa’s mind that this is Lincoln’s distraction, the fire engulfing at least two of Nia’s tents in the direction that Lincoln was last seen going in the direction of. And it works too – the two men who just seconds ago had been about to discover the small group infiltrating Nia’s island shout something unintelligible and then race off in the direction of the flames.

“We have to get out of here,” Lexa hisses to her two companions, adjusting her hold on the blonde girl in her arms so that carrying her is a little more comfortable. “Now.”

“No!” the dark-haired girl protests. “We have to wait for Lincoln.”

For the briefest moment, Lexa is torn. Lincoln, an old comrade of hers until he wound up getting captured by the British Navy and almost hung at the gallows, is not somebody whose fate Lexa feels entirely comfortable leaving in the hands of the most terrifyingly unpredictable pirate in the Caribbean. Yet if they don’t leave now, if they don’t hurry back to Lexa’s ship and sail far away from _Isla de los Tormentos_ as fast as they can, Lexa knows that it will be far more than Lincoln’s life that is in danger.

Lincoln is a fighter who has already evaded a death sentence once in his life. Lexa has every confidence that he could do the same again. Besides, Nia knows that Lincoln and Lexa were once close – his life isn’t in immediate danger if Nia uses this to her advantage by keeping him as a prisoner.

The rest of them however, this small party of four that includes an unconscious girl who could wake up at any moment and alert Nia’s camp to their presence, cannot say the same.

“I’m sorry, but we have to leave him behind,” Lexa tells the anguished girl.

“But … but I _love_ him,” she pleads.

“Lincoln will be safe,” Lexa promises her. “Nia won’t kill him. But she will kill us if we don’t get off this island now.”

“Octavia…” says the curly-haired man, reaching out to rest a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I just got you back. Don’t let me lose you again.”

The dark-haired girl – Octavia – reaches up and wipes away a tear that threatens to fall, then clenches her jaw as her eyebrows furrow together in a bitter resentment.

“Fine,” she eventually concedes, her voice almost a growl. She glances across to Lexa with hostility in her eyes, as if blaming Lexa for Lincoln’s plight, then starts moving through the thick undergrowth away from the camp that is still rocking from the explosion. “Let’s go.”

* * *

When Clarke wakes up there are a few brief moments of blissful ignorance before she remembers everything.

She surges up into a seated positon, letting out a feral cry to display her anguish at the loss of her father, which still burns like an open wound on her heart, limbs thrashing around in a childish tantrum. Until she realises that her legs are restricted by something, and then realises that they are being restricted by heavy furs draped over her like blankets.

It’s only then that Clarke starts to take in her surroundings. She’s lying on a bed, a huge four poster covered in a multitude of thick furs and pelts, enclosed by four dark wooden walls. There’s a window against the wall to Clarke’s left but the view beyond is hidden in the cover of the darkness outside. The cabin’s only light comes from the candles that litter every available surface, tiny glimmers of orange light that bathe the room in a hazy glow.

“Hello, Clarke.”

Clarke doesn’t know how she didn’t notice her before, the pirate captain sitting in a velvet covered armchair in the corner, sprawled against the back of the chair with her legs crossed just above the knee in a pose that is most commanding. She plays with a small knife between her hands, pressing the sharp tip of it against the pads of a finger on the opposite hand.

“Your friends gave me your name, by the way,” Lexa explains, as if she believes that it’s an answer to the question at the front of Clarke’s mind. “They’re all safe, don’t worry. My crew got to them before Nia’s did.”

The last thing that Clarke remembers is being ambushed from behind, a strong arm around her neck choking her as the world around her slowly slipped into black, and she reaches up with one of her hands to her throat, touching the skin there gently as if expecting to find marks there left behind by her attacker.

“What did you do to me?” she rasps.

“I knocked you out,” Lexa replies without hesitation. “You were making too much noise and it was the easiest way to quieten you down.”

Tossing the furs covering her body aside, Clarke swings her legs over the side and strides across the small cabin to where Lexa sits. Upon Clarke’s approach, she sits up a little straighter, digging the blade of the knife into the fabric on one of the arms of the chair.

“My father is _dead_!” Clarke spits at her, lacing each of her words with venomous contempt.

“And you would be too if I hadn’t intervened and saved your…”

“My father is dead,” Clarke repeats, shaking her head in disbelief, “and the woman who killed him was right _there_. I could have killed her, I could have avenged him, if only you hadn’t taken it upon yourself to _assault_ me and take me hostage on your ship.”

“You will _never_ be a hostage on my ship, Clarke.”

Lexa’s voice is impossibly soft and Clarke, who wants nothing more than to shout and scream and blame somebody for the agonising grief that claws at her insides, is left feeling disarmed. She wants Lexa to fight back, to argue with the tenacity that Clarke knows her to be capable of. What Clarke is not expecting, is for Lexa’s voice to curl around Clarke’s name with the delicacy that one would handle an ancient valuable artefact, as if terrified that she might break Clarke just by saying her name in a voice that is too harsh.

“I could have killed her,” Clarke repeats, perhaps assuring herself of this fact more than she is trying to convince Lexa.

Lexa pushes herself up into a standing position, swiftly returning the knife to its pouch on her belt and tilting her chin upwards, as if to assert her dominance, though the softness that Clarke sees in those green-eyes seem to say otherwise. Clarke takes a couple of miniscule steps backwards as the Commander stands off against her, but she remains defiant, holding that gaze with all the confidence that she can muster.

“You honestly believe that you could have killed Nia?” Lexa asks. When Clarke nods determinedly, refusing to back down, Lexa continues, “You think you could have done what the Royal Navy have been trying to do for months, what every other pirate in the Caribbean has dreamt of doing for _years_?”

“I could have tried,” Clarke half yells at Lexa, throwing her hands up in the air and turning her back to the other woman.

“No, you couldn’t.”

Lexa’s reply is the last straw, the complete calmness in her voice, the absolute certainty that she is correct, and Clarke loses it.

“Go fuck yourself!” she bellows, turning to look at Lexa once more and spitting the words into her face, before storming out of the captain’s cabin with a crash.

The deck of Lexa’s ship is much busier than Clarke is used to on their ship, even at night when much of the crew will be sleeping below deck in their quarters. Bursting out into unfamiliar territory, Clarke stops dead in her tracks right outside the cabin doors, realising that she hardly recognises anybody on deck. She spots Octavia and Bellamy sitting next to each other on an upturned crate, a blanket draped over their laps and Bellamy’s arm around his sister’s shoulders, but Clarke doesn’t want to interrupt their sibling reunion. Besides, it’s almost too painful to watch them together, knowing that it could have been her reuniting with a lost family member.

As she blinks rapidly in an attempt to ward off the tears that sting in her eyes, Clarke hurries over to the side of the ship, folding her arms on top of the railings and leaning her head against her arms. A thick lump forms at the back of her throat with the effort to not cry, but it all gets far too overwhelming. The realisation that she’s never going to see her father again hits her as suddenly as a blade to the heart, except that instead of instant death, it’s a slow, never-ending kind of pain that numbs all her senses except for her ability to feel, which just gets immeasurably heightened.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” says a voice behind Clarke, recognisable without the need for turning around to face its owner. Clarke had been expecting Lexa to follow her out of the cabin but what she couldn’t have predicted was the soft compassion in her voice, a complete contrast to the usual aloofness.

“Go away,” Clarke chokes, her entire body trembling with the effort of trying not to cry.

“Three years ago, Nia killed somebody close to me too,” Lexa starts to explain. It’s not what Clarke is expecting at all, and her head jerks up at the words, turning to look at her. The expression on her face is deep, with just a hint of pain as she recalls the memories and recounts them to Clarke. “Her name was Costia, she was … she was _special_.”

Clarke doesn’t need any further elaboration to know what Lexa’s choice of words means, and she nods once, her brows furrowing as Lexa avoids her gaze, swallowing thickly before she is ready to continue.

“Nia took her, because she was _mine_ , and beheaded her,” Lexa recalls with a tiny wince. “She died because I loved her. If it wasn’t for me, she wouldn’t be dead.”

Lexa chokes almost imperceptibly on this last word, and Clarke gets it completely, she understands now that pain of loving somebody that you can’t imagine living without.

“I wanted to kill Nia afterwards, of _course_ I wanted to kill her,” continues Lexa. “I would stay up every night thinking of new ways to end her life, each one more creative and painful than the one before. She deserved to die because she took away the one thing that I truly cared about and sent her severed head back to me in a shipping crate.”

Though her entire body is still overwhelmed with grief, Clarke feels a little bit of regret for the way she snapped at Lexa earlier. Losing a father is terrible, so much so that Clarke’s brain is only just beginning to comprehend the fact that he’s never going to return from the sea again, but Jake’s job required so much travel that she didn’t see much of him anyway. She’s going to miss him tremendously, of course, and right now it feels like she will never be able to feel anything except for grief, however she’s reaching an age of parental independence that means her life won’t change drastically now that he is gone.

Losing a lover however, Clarke even begin to understand the pain of. She can’t imagine falling for somebody and planning a whole life together, a life on the seas with nothing but absolute freedom, and then having that future snatched away in such a sudden and brutal way.

“I’m sorry,” Clarke mumbles.

Nodding in acknowledgment and then swallowing visibly, Lexa says, “The point I’m trying to make is that that urge will eventually go away. You’ll hurt for a while, and you’ll always miss him, but you won’t always want to kill her as much as you do now.”

Clarke frowns as she recalls Lexa’s earlier words about being filled with a hatred for Nia and a similar desire to see the Pirate Queen pay for stolen lives with her own that Clarke has felt since Bellamy broke the news to her on the island. And yet, three years after Costia’s death, Nia is still commanding her own ship, still taking innocent lives for reasons no better than pure malicious evil.

“Why didn’t you kill her?” Clarke blurts out the question that she is desperate to learn the answer to, hoping in a vague kind of way that Lexa might be able to provide her with some solace from the unrelenting contempt that she feels towards Captain Nia.

“Sorry?”

“Why didn’t you kill Nia after she murdered your…” Clarke trails off and takes the time to choose her words carefully, before she continues, “…after she murdered Costia?”

Her eyebrows knit close together so that a line of concern forms between them, Lexa answers “Because for as long as Nia stayed alive, I still had somebody to be angry at. The moment I kill her, that goes away.” She adds, almost as a sorrowful afterthought, “And killing Nia is never going to bring Costia back.”

Clarke continues persistently, the tears from earlier nearly forgotten as she channels her grief into motivation to get revenge.

“That’s true, but if you _had_ killed her when you wanted to, then my father would still be alive,” Clarke points out. “Everybody who she has killed since Costia would still be here. Hundreds of people would still have the people they love in their lives. And if we don’t kill her now, other people are going to lose their brothers, their fathers, their … their _special_ person. We could put a stop to that. We could save lives by taking just one.”

Lexa considers Clarke’s words, her eyes brimming with sad thoughtfulness, then shakes her head.

“That’s not how it works.”

“That’s exactly how it works!” Clarke retorts, raising her voice to her get her point across. “I want her dead, you want her dead. Half the pirates in the Caribbean want her dead and they all look to you as their Commander.” Lifting her chin in defiance and narrowing her eyes as she concludes with a hint of a challenge in her voice, “Answer me this, Captain Woods; why not?”

As bold as she has ever been when standing up to Lexa, and fighting past the painful lump that lodges itself in her throat as a nagging part of her mind wonders if her father would be happy with her decision to avenge his death by setting out on a mission to find and kill Nia, Clarke keeps her head held high and her eyes set firmly on the pirate captain standing before her. Lexa’s green eyes flicker with doubt but Clarke can see within their depths that rather than the outright no that Clarke is so used to receiving, for the first time ever Lexa is actually considering her proposition.

“Indra!” Lexa calls out after a staring match that seems to continue for a thousand lifetimes, not even breaking eye contact as she speaks. The corners of her lips turn up into a little smile, and Clarke watches as the eyes fixated upon her own soften slightly and fill with an excitement unlike any that she has seen in the broody pirate captain before. “We’re changing course! Set sail for Tortuga at once!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in getting this chapter up - life has been crazy recently and this chapter has been bugging me with how difficult it was to get right. But the story is just starting to get to the good bit, I can promise you plenty of Clexa interactions in the next few chapters as they get to know each other and learn how to work together!


	8. Chapter 8

Tortuga is every bit as terrible as Clarke imagined it would be, and then some.

The first thing that Clarke notices is the smell. It crawls up her nostrils like a small but persistent insect, the nasty combination of rum, body odours and sewage getting stuck at the very back of Clarke’s throat and causing her to cough as she steps off the ship and starts making her way down the boardwalk into the town.

The second thing is just how much there is going on. Tortuga is like an assault on every one of Clarke’s senses – she can barely hear herself think over the shouting and the singing (and slightly more alarmingly, the _gunshots_ ), while everywhere she looks there is something happening. Her eyes are wide in a stunned kind of horror as she follows on Lexa’s heels, taking in the hordes of rowdy drunkards that line the streets as far as the eye can see. Clarke has been on some nights of serious drinking with Raven and her other friends back in Nassau, some that she can’t even remember, but she didn’t realise it was possible for one person to be as drunk as the pirates who surround her, let alone for an entire town to be so universally out of their minds due to alcohol.

It’s not just pirates though. A blind beggar man sits against the wall of a house, hands held out before him in an ignored plea for gold; musicians with fiddles, accordions and tambourines play boisterous hornpipes and sea shanties; rats scuttle past their feet and go seemingly unnoticed by everybody except Clarke, who recoils in horror when she sees them.

Clarke is also taken aback by the fact that Lexa gets propositioned by no fewer than three whores before they even make it out of the docks, a matter which seems to faze Lexa so little that Clarke comes to realise that it must be a regular occurrence. Clarke has to admit, the whole broody pirate commander thing that Lexa has going is, if Clarke tries to be _completely_ objective, something that could be seen as quite attractive.

“Where are we going?” Clarke asks Lexa, as she struggles to keep up with the pirate captain’s long stride through the crowds of people that swarm the dock.

“Tortuga is made up of two things,” Lexa explains, pushing past a beggar man who steps in front of them with an upturned hat in his outstretched hands. “Taverns and brothels. The brothels will be our last resort. I don’t really like to show my face in them too often.”

Taken aback by Lexa’s words, Clarke silently prays that it doesn’t have to come to that (Clarke has only found herself inside a brothel once before and that was a fleeting visit to rescue Raven who had ended up in there by mistake, but it was enough to decide never to step foot in one again).

“So we’re going to a tavern then?”

“It’s a good enough place to start,” Lexa agrees with a nod.

Lexa’s movements catch Clarke by surprise, swerving suddenly to the left and taking a sharp corner beneath a crumbling bridge and down a cobbled street lined with pubs. Drunken pirates swarm everywhere, spilling out onto the streets with each hand clasped around the handle of a huge tankard full of dark ale. Lexa ducks into the first such establishment on the left, Clarke close behind her, and stops in the entrance, squinting around the packed room.

“I should be able to find somebody that I know in here,” Lexa tells her.

Clarke takes in their new surroundings. It’s much like the taverns back in Nassau, only twice as big and with four times the number of pirates tightly packed into every corner of the room. To the right, a twisting staircase leads up to a second level, where a balcony with an almost dangerously low railing overlooks the ground floor. To the left, the bar itself stretches along the entire wall in front of shelves lines with dusty glass bottles filled with dark liquid.

Clarke pushes a hand into her pocket, delving within to locate a few coins, which she takes out and lets sit in the palm of her hand.

“Do you want a drink?” Clarke asks Lexa, though she already knows that it will take an inordinate amount of alcohol for her to feel comfortable in a bar full of pirates with nobody but a pirate commander for company.

“No thank you,” Lexa responds with a dismissive wave of her hand, and Clarke lets the coins drop back into her pocket with a jingle. “Business calls.”

Once again, Lexa is off without a word, manoeuvring through the crowds of people with a skill that can only come from years of practice. Clarke follows after her, clumsily pushing her way through a crowd of rowdy men who reek of seawater, alcohol and sweat. She loses sight of Lexa twice, each time wondering if this is how she is supposed to meet her end, suffocating to death in a crowd of inebriated pirates, but eventually catches up to the captain when she stops next to a table occupied by a single woman.

“Luna,” Lexa says, by way of greeting.

In a single swift movement, Lexa removes the leather hat from her head, rolls up the long sleeves of her coat to expose tanned forearms, and drops into the seat opposite a woman that Clarke has never laid eyes on before. Lexa’s pose is full of confidence, knees spread slightly wider than hip distance apart, elbows leaning on the small wooden table between the two women and her hands clasped tightly in front of her.

The woman opposite Lexa, however, leans back in her seat, placing her heavy tankard down on the table as a slow smirk spreads across her face.

“Captain Woods.”

“Enough of the formalities, Luna,” says Lexa, and her voice is unlike Clarke has ever heard it before, speaking to this Luna person with a familiarity that can only come with an old friendship.

“What do you want, Lexa?”

“Who says I want anything?” Lexa bickers back.

“You never come to Tortuga unless you want something,” Luna arches a brow at Lexa, causing Lexa to shrug her shoulders slightly in defeat. Her eyes flickering up to Clarke, Luna nods her head in Clarke’s direction and then asks, “Who is your friend?”

Lexa shifts her posture slightly, allowing room for Clarke, who had been standing slightly awkwardly behind Lexa’s left shoulder, to take a step forward and join the conversation.

“This is Clarke Griffin. She … that is to say, _we_ need your help.”

Luna’s eyes narrow ever so slightly, then her nose crinkles up as she replies, “No. Absolutely not.”

She reaches out for her tankard of ale, lifting it to her mouth and taking a long swig of the dark liquid within, shaking her head in Lexa’s direction disapprovingly.

“You don’t even know what I’m asking of you,” Lexa argues, a hint of the sharp commanding edge to her voice creeping into her tone.

“Yes I do,” Luna tells her. “You’re going after Nia.”

“How did you…?” Lexa asks in disbelief, before she trails off, shaking her head slowly. “Never mind.”

As disappointed as she is that the first person they’ve asked for help has turned them down before even hearing the question, Clarke can’t help but be impressed at the speed at which gossip seems to spread like the plague across the Caribbean. In all honesty, she’s not too sure how the news that Lexa has decided to go after Nia has reached Tortuga before Lexa’s ship could even make it, but it’s an extraordinary feat nonetheless.

“Going after Nia is as good as putting a noose around your own neck,” says Luna. “Until she attacks one of my ships, I’m staying out of it.

“I’m sorry, but is Nia your Commander or am I?” asks Lexa, her voice a low growl as her anger visibly bubbles away at Luna’s words.

Though she isn’t in the direct line of Lexa’s anger, Clarke takes a couple of tiny steps back in fear of being caught in the crossfire. Though their time knowing each other has not been much, and their time together as comrades even less so, Clarke hasn’t seen Lexa even appreciative of her title of Commander, let alone owning it in the way that she is right now.

“I’m tired of this petty feud between you and Nia,” Luna says with a sigh. “I thought it would all end when Nia killed Costia but…”

With an almighty roar, Lexa upends the table between them, sending it crashing to the floor and splashing the remainder of Luna’s drink across her lap. The empty tankard hits the floor with a clatter and rolls away, lost in amongst the boots of the nearby sailors. With nothing more than an animalistic snarl that has even Clarke cowering away in terror, Lexa gets to her feet and takes long strides towards the exit, pushing aside the people that stand between her and the street outside carelessly.

Clarke spares one final glance for Luna, who wears not a single trace of an apology on her face. Shaking her head in disapproval, Clarke mutters, “Thanks for nothing,” before chasing after Lexa through the crowds and out onto the busy street.

“Lexa, wait!”

She finds the pirate captain leaning against the wall just outside the tavern, her expression once again composed as if she hasn’t just thrown a table at another woman, except for a glint of resentment that lingers in her eyes.

“There are others,” Lexa says, and Clarke gets the impression that she’s saying the words more for her own benefit than for Clarke’s.

Sensing that Lexa has more to say, Clarke prompts her, “But…”

“But Luna captains a huge crew that spreads out across three giant warships,” Lexa elaborates, pushing herself off the wall and straightening her long coat. With a shrug, she adds, “Not to mention the fact that she has great influence over almost half the fishermen in the Caribbean. She would be a great ally against Nia. Having her by our side would take the pressure off needing to find anybody else.”

“But there are others,” Clarke reminds her, echoing Lexa’s words from earlier.

* * *

They go to two more taverns, speaking with another one of Lexa’s associates in each one, and the conversations take an almost identical path to the one with Luna, minus the upturned table. Lexa does all of the talking, with Clarke lurking close behind almost like a completely non-threatening bodyguard, on hand to step in if Lexa needs her help. Though if the table incident is anything to go by, Lexa is more than in capable of looking after herself, in total control of everything.

In total control of everything except the answers that are being given to her by the other pirates, which are both a resounding no.

“I don’t understand,” Lexa says, resting her head in her hands in dejection. “These are _my_ people. They answer to _me_. This is tantamount to mutiny.” She lets out a disheartened sigh. “I’ve done nothing but good for them and this is how they repay me.”

“It’s fine,” Clarke reassures her with a comforting hand on Lexa’s shoulder. “We’ll find somebody who wants to help us. In the meantime, can I get you a drink?”

Three rejections later, Lexa’s answer is not the same dismissive response that it was in the first tavern. Instead, she hesitates only momentarily before nodding her head.

“Is beer good? Or do you want something stronger?”

“Beer is fine,” replies Lexa.

Clarke pushes her way to the bar, not bothering with a polite _excuse me_ like she would have done before. A few days on the ocean is all that it has taken for Clarke to take leave of all manners that she was brought up to use, or at the very least enlightened her to the ways of sailors enough to know that pushing through the crowds will be much more effective than politely asking and then waiting for them to step aside.

It takes Clarke a while to get served (she quickly realises that this is because she isn’t showering the barmaids with the same kind of lecherous attention that everybody else waiting to be served is) but when she does, she carries the two large tankards of ale back to the table where Lexa sits.

Only to find that Lexa is no longer alone. Slouching in the seat across from her, the one that was so recently occupied by the man who turned their proposition down, is another female pirate, a magnificent captain’s hat complete with a plume of red feathers perched atop her head, a smirk curling across her face as she speaks with Lexa.

“Here you go,” Clarke interrupts as unobtrusively as she can, realising that Lexa is quite probably in the middle of asking for this woman’s help, placing one of the ales on the table in front of Lexa and keeping the other in her own hand.

The other woman stops mid-sentence, sitting up a little straighter to peer up at Clarke with wide, curious eyes. She takes in Clarke’s appearance, from her dirty blonde hair to the tatty clothes that she’s been wearing day and night since leaving Nassau several days ago, and then returns her attention back to Lexa with a slanted smile on her face.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me, Lexa?”

There’s clearly something that Clarke is missing from this conversation, a tension in the air between the two women that Clarke can sense but not even begin to understand, because Lexa rolls her eyes before speaking.

“This is Anya,” she tells Clarke, her tone of voice flat and almost disinterested. “She’s one of my oldest acquaintances.”

The other woman – Anya – snorts loudly and shakes her head.

“Acquaintances? Is that what we are now?” she scoffs. Turning to Clarke, Anya nods with her head to point in Lexa’s direction and then explains, “I’m her big sister.”

“We grew up together,” Lexa corrects her.

“I taught her everything she knows.”

“Not quite _everything_.”

Clarke watches, half in amusement and half in a slight state of shock as the two women bicker back and forth in the way that sisters – or people who grew up together – would.

“It does seem that I failed at teaching you how to have a good night in Tortuga.” Anya smirks at Lexa once again. “I should probably offer to buy something stronger than ale for you and…”

Anya’s gaze flicks across to Clarke expectantly, trailing off at the end and waiting for somebody to complete her sentence by offering up the missing information.

“Oh,” Clarke says quickly, offering a hand out across the table for Anya to shake. “Clarke. Clarke Griffin.”

Anya eyes Clarke’s outstretched hand suspiciously, choosing not to take it in her own, and Clarke lets it awkwardly fall back down against her side.

“She’s prettier than the last one, Lex.”

Beside her, Lexa chokes on the mouthful of ale she unfortunately decided to take just at that moment, spraying it across the table. Realising that Anya has made a terrible assumption about the nature of her relationship with Lexa – indeed, assuming that they are anything more than reluctant companions forced to work together for the greater good of all sailors in the Caribbean is a mistake – Clarke makes a quick attempt to settle any confusion that lies between them.

“Oh no, we’re not…” she tries to explain, gesturing between herself and Lexa and shaking her head quickly in order to exaggerate her point.

“Oh!” Anya’s eyes widen in realisation, then she shoots Clarke a sly wink. Leaning her body across the table, she lowers her voice and continues, “That’s fine. I can be discreet.”

Hearing Lexa’s huff from beside her, Clarke opens her mouth to correct but Anya’s attention has drifted elsewhere.

“So what brings the Commander to Tortuga?” she asks, slouching back in her chair and folding her arms across her chest. “I thought you made a point of avoiding this place unless there’s an emergency.”

“Who says there isn’t an emergency?” Lexa replies stiffly.

“There’s no emergency,” Anya scoffs. “I know everything that happens in the Caribbean before it happens.”

“Then you know where I’ve come from,” says Lexa.

“ _Isla de los Tormentos_?”

Lexa neither confirms nor denies Anya’s statement, but her silence is all the confirmation that Anya needs.

“Seriously?” she asks incredulously, as if she hadn’t been expecting her guess to actually be correct. She lets out a low groan and kicks Lexa beneath the table with one of her heavy boots. “Roan is going to be such a shit when he hears that it’s true. I swore blind to him that you would never go anywhere near that place.”

“Roan’s here?” Lexa perks up at the mention of this mysterious person, who Clarke presumes is just another one of Lexa’s many pirate acquaintances. “I could use his help, actually. He would be a useful ally against Nia.”

Anya sits up straight, resting her elbows on the table to lean her body towards theirs,

“You’re going after Nia? You’ve spent three years trying to make peace with Nia and then _she_ -” Anya jerks her head in Clarke’s direction, “- comes along and you decide you’re going to kill her? Why is it with you that there is always a girl involved?”

Feeling slightly embarrassed about her presence here, the two other women talking about her as if she isn’t standing right beside them, Clarke does her best to pretend like she isn’t hanging off every word that they say. She tries to hide behind the big metal tankard, taking a few long swigs from it and keeping it close to her face in an attempt to act like she’s busy.

“There isn’t always a girl involved,” retorts Lexa haughtily. It’s obvious from the brusque tone of her voice and from her body language, shoulder set stiffly and the fingers of each hand fidgeting with each other where they rest in her lap, that she’s not comfortable with the direction that the conversation is going in. With the direction that the conversation _keeps_ going in.

Sensing an impending argument, Clarke decides to interject before things get too heated between the two women, placing her tankard down on the table with a thud that it much louder than necessary, but it has the desired effect of getting the attention of both Lexa and Anya. The very last thing she wants is a repeat of the table incident from the first tavern.

“Nia killed my father,” Clarke tells Anya, pushing past the lump that forms her throat as she says the words aloud. “She killed Costia and she’s killed god knows how many people since and she’s going to keep killing people unless somebody does something about her.”

Anya glances quickly across to Lexa, her eyebrows knit together in a silent question, and Lexa nods once to verify what Clarke is saying.

“I’m not helping you,” Anya shrugs disinterestedly. “Three years ago I would have, but not today. Besides, I like having all my body parts firmly attached.”

Lexa gets to her feet and for just a moment Clarke thinks that she’s actually going to attack Anya. When she speaks, however, her voice isn’t threatening, although Clarke can definitely detect a hint of bitterness creeping in at the edges of her tone.

“If you weren’t my sister I’d run my sword straight through you for that comment.”

A sly smile spreading across her lips, Anya quips back, “I knew there would be some advantages to growing up with you.”

“Goodbye, Anya,” Lexa says, with finality in her voice.

“See you around, little sister. Unless Nia kills you of course.”

Clarke is quick to follow, tipping the last few dregs of beer into her mouth and then leaving the now empty tankard on the table. She nods a quick farewell of her own to Anya, not bothering to wait for any kind of response before she chases Lexa out of the inn and into the bustling streets of Tortuga once more.

“Where to next?” she asks brightly, as if they haven’t just been rejected for the fourth time in quick succession, and this time by a woman who is as good as Lexa’s sister, no less.

“Back to _Polis_ ,” Lexa answers. Though Clarke can tell that Lexa is trying to hide the pessimism in her voice, she can just about hear it, the words sounding slightly forced and not quite as certain as they usually are.

“But we haven’t….” Clarke starts to remind her.

“If Anya won’t help us then nobody will,” Lexa interrupts.

And there it is. The crushing realisation that it’s just going to be the two of them embarking on this mission. Just the two of them, and a single crew full of people who are obliged to help either because they are Clarke’s friends or because Lexa would cast them away on a deserted island if they refused to help. And with just a single ship going up against what could potentially be an entire army of people loyal to Nia, it’s quite possible that Clarke and Lexa are about to lead that entire crew to their deaths.

It’s a devastating thought, but one that could most likely become a reality.

And so, with the two options going forward being either forgetting about Nia and going back to Nassau to grieve for her father without having avenged his death, or sailing headfirst into a most unpleasant almost certain demise of her own, the only thing that seems like a good idea is getting drunk out of her mind.

“We could stay for another drink,” Clarke voices her suggestion aloud for Lexa’s consideration. “Enjoy Tortuga while we’re here?”

“The drinks in this place are absolute _piss,_ ” Lexa screws her nose up in disgust at the very thought of venturing back into one of Tortuga’s drinking establishments. Clarke’s heart sinks for only a brief moment, before Lexa comes out with a suggestion of her own. _“_ I have a stash of good rum back in my cabin, we could drink that instead?”


	9. Chapter 9

The walk back to _Polis_ is a silent one. Lexa leads the way and she can hears Clarke’s footsteps just behind her as they navigate a path through crowded streets and winding alleys back to the docks.

The sight that greets them as they round the final corner onto the boardwalk that lines the beach is one of Lexa’s favourites. Even in a town as pitiful as Tortuga, the harbour at night is beautiful – shadowy masts towering into the air from the tens of empty ships afloat close to the docks, the lanterns on the deck of each one casting the entire area in a dim orange glow. With most of the crews out within the town itself, the decks are empty but for one or two men left on duty, and the stillness of not just one ship that is usually bustling with life, but an entire harbour full of them, is a wondrous sight that never fails to amaze Lexa.

However, the view doesn’t quite do enough to brighten Lexa’s mood. The refusals to help Lexa in her quest to finally put an end to all of Nia’s trouble, even from her own sister, gnaw uneasily at her insides.

The relationship between Lexa and Anya has always been a tricky one. On one hand they've always been close - growing up as the only two orphan kids on a ship of otherwise fully grown pirates gives you a special bond that never really leaves you, even into adulthood when you both captain your own ships. But Lexa would be lying if she said that it didn't bring its share of struggles with it too; an age old grudge, selfish deceit, and a fiercely competitive edge (mostly on Anya's part) that can be detrimental to them working together in the most crucial of times.

One might have thought that growing up together on the same ship, they would know each other better than anybody, but Anya still remains a complete enigma to Lexa. Her actions are unpredictable, the things she says are often brash and unexpected, and most irritatingly of all, the opposite cannot be said - she can read Lexa in an instant.

The implications that Anya was making about Clarke, however, send a shiver of discomfort down Lexa’s spine. She doesn’t understand how Anya’s words can be so far from the truth, yet still resonate with Lexa as clearly as they would if they were true. And if Lexa is completely honest, though she hasn’t even thought about looking in Clarke in that way until now, she’s just starting to realise that maybe she has been doing so all along.

She can’t even begin to understand how uncomfortable the comments may have made Clarke.

“I’m sorry,” Lexa voices her thoughts aloud, as she stands aside to let Clarke walk up the gangplank that leads back onto the Polis first, before following her onto the ship.

“There’s no need to apologise,” Clarke assures her. “We can come up with a new plan, a better plan.”

“I meant about Anya,” Lexa is quick to correct Clarke, all thought of their failed task in Tortuga having been pushed completely out of her mind. “The things she was saying. I’m sorry. Anya can be…”

Lexa pauses for thought, trying to come up with a word to describe her oldest friend in a way that does justification for how much Anya cares about her despite the relentless teasing.

“Blunt?” Clarke guesses, filling in the gap herself.

Laughing softly under her breath, Lexa nods in agreement.

“That’s the polite way of saying it.”

Lexa leads the way into her cabin, hurriedly tidying a few things away until the small circular table is empty but for three thick candles and two bottles of the finest rum in Lexa’s collection, dusty from disuse. Without the need for formalities, she removes her heavy coat, tossing it haphazardly over the furs covering her bed, before gesturing to one of the two chairs at the table for Clarke to sit in while taking her own seat in the other one.

“We’re drinking from the bottle?” Clarke asks sceptically, as Lexa uncorks one of the two bottles and draws it across the table towards herself, leaving the other in the middle of the table for Clarke to do the same with.

“Welcome to Tortuga,” Lexa replies, smiling across at Clarke as she holds her bottle aloft over the table. Clarke reaches for the other one, quickly removing the stopper, before raising the bottle in the air and tapping it against Lexa’s with a soft clink.

Silence falls over the cabin as they each take a swig from their respective bottles. Lexa watches in mild amusement as Clarke’s face morphs into a wince at the taste of the bitter liquid within.

“Not a rum drinker?”

“Not without having had a great deal more ale first,” Clarke answers, before quickly forcing herself to take another drink of the rum, grimacing again as she places the bottle back down on the table and swallows. “So, what’s the plan now?”

It’s Lexa’s turn to recoil. It’s late, she doesn’t have to worry about what’s going on above deck while the ship is docked, and she’s got a bottle of fine rum in front of her that’s practically begging to be drunk. The very last thing she wants to discuss is work, particularly after the night that they’ve had.

“Can we talk about something else?” she asks, sending Clarke a pleading look.

Clarke speaks almost instantly, barely taking any time to think before she says, “Tell me about Costia.”

Lexa almost chokes when she hears the words. She doesn’t know what she was expecting Clarke’s idea of a casual conversation topic to be, but it certainly wasn’t anything even remotely close to Lexa’s brutally murdered ex-lover.

Seeing the wide-eyed expression of surprise on Lexa’s face, Clarke jumps in quickly to add, “Only if you want to, of course. I’m just intrigued about what kind of person she was.”

“She was…”

Lexa starts her sentence, then promptly trails off. It’s harder than she thought it would be to find the words to describe Costia, not just because she was a one-of-a-kind girl for whom there aren’t the words to do her justice, but also because it’s been three long years since she was alive and memories fade fast in that time. After three years, Costia’s face is becoming a distant blur, her voice no longer serves as Lexa’s conscience, her laughter doesn’t ring in Lexa’s mind when she dreams of happy memories from years past at night in the lonely confines of her captain’s cabin. Costia becomes more of a ghost with each day that passes, until soon everything about her will have disappeared like a wisp of smoke into the air.

Pushing past the lump that tries to form in her throat, Lexa shrugs one of her shoulders and then concludes, “She was special.”

“I’m sure she was,” Clarke hums in agreement, a curious frown on her face as she looks at Lexa with an expression that suggests she’s expecting Lexa to say more on the subject.

“I was never supposed to fall in love with her,” Lexa continues, smiling happily as she begins to recall the happiest moments of her life. The memories are like the old rum bottles that they drink from, hidden by a covering of dust from their disuse but now that she brings them to the front of her mind, the dust unsettles and they become a little clearer. “I was never supposed to fall in love with anybody but especially not her. We met almost by accident. I had a huge row with Anya – this was before I became captain of the Polis and I’d just told her I wanted to leave her crew to get my own ship – and I stormed out of the inn where Costia worked in a temper.” Lexa laughs quietly under her breath at the memory of their first meeting. “I left my hat in there in my hurry to leave and she chased after me to return it.”

“It sounds like you made quite the first impression,” Clarke muses softly, her blue eyes twinkling in amusement.

“That I did,” Lexa agrees. “After she returned my hat, she told me off for throwing a chair at Anya and then offered to listen to me rant.”

“Do you make a habit of that?” Clarke asks, leaning forward in her seat with an air of mischief etched up on her face.

“Of what?”

“Of throwing items of furniture at people when they annoy you?”

Lexa laughs aloud, then takes another swig from her bottle before she answers, “Well, it’s either that or I hold a knife to their throat.”

Clarke’s loud peal of laughter fills the room and Lexa can’t help but chuckle along. She doesn’t remember the last time she had this much fun – in fact, she can’t remember the last time she had any fun at all. If only she had known that all it would take would be a couple of bottles of fine rum shared with an almost complete stranger, she would have perhaps done this much sooner.

She has a feeling, however, that it has less to do with the situation and more to do with Clarke.

“You make a lot of good first impressions,” Clarke tells her jovially. Sitting back in her chair and taking a quick drink, Clarke looks at Lexa expectantly, awaiting the next part of the story. “So, what next? You two just fell in love like that?”

“Pretty much,” nods Lexa. “We stayed up talking until sunrise and I think I knew right then that my heart would belong to her. I complained about Anya and she told me about her three brothers and her job and her big dreams of leaving that town to explore the world, and then before we even knew it, she helped me to acquire my own ship and I asked her to join my crew. It was … _she_ was perfect.”

“What was she like?” Clarke asks, seeming genuinely interested in hearing the answer. It’s rather refreshing actually, to finally meet somebody who seems interested in what she has to say, instead of only caring about who she is and what her next actions will be.

“She was everything that I’m not,” Lexa shrugs simply, “and everything that I needed. She was kind, and patient, and made me feel like I actually mattered for the first time in my life. She made me a better person. And she was so, _so_ beautiful. I don’t know what I did to deserve to call her mine.”

Lexa almost jumps out of her chair when Clarke’s hand reaches across the table to cover her own. The feeling of warm fingers gently squeezing her own is far from unwelcome, but when it has been years since Lexa has opened herself up to accepting any kind of physical touch, let alone affection, it’s startling at first to receive even the most basic contact from another person.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Clarke tells her, earnest blue eyes looking at Lexa with complete sincerity across the table.

“Ever since she’s been gone,” Lexa continues, her voice gentler and even more nostalgic than before, “I’ve always been worried about reverting back to my old self, about becoming the selfish person who threw chairs at Anya and stormed off when I didn’t get my way. Sometimes I am that person and I hate myself for it.”

Lexa reaches out for her rum, wrapping her fingers around the neck of the bottle and bringing it to her lips to take a drink. She drinks long and slow, savouring the taste, before finally placing the bottle back on the table with a thunk. All the while, Clarke watches her with curiosity etched on her face.

“Costia wouldn’t have wanted me to kill Nia," Lexa tells her, thinking back to the Costia that she knew and smiling softly as she imagines the way that Costia would scold her for wanting to kill her enemies when she could spend that time bringing about more peace in the Caribbean. Back when Costia was still alive, Lexa hated being reprimanded by Costia and would do anything to avoid conflict but now, when Costia has been nothing more than a memory for three years. Lexa would give up her ship for the chance to see Costia with her hands on her hips, the little crease between her eyebrows, and the tone of voice that seemed to be reserved specifically for disagreeing with Lexa. "That’s the only reason I didn’t do it. The selfish part of me from before Costia wanted to exact my revenge and cause Nia as much pain as she caused me, but there was always Costia’s voice in my head telling me to be the better person.”

Clarke's fingers resting over Lexa's give the gentlest of squeezes, before Clarke says, "I’m sorry if me asking for your help is asking for you to become that person that you left behind.”

“Don’t apologise," Lexa tells her. "If I had gone after Nia and tried to kill her three years ago, I would have been doing it for the revenge, for purely selfish reasons, and that’s what Costia wouldn’t have wanted me to do. But now, we’re doing it to save more lives in the future, to stop more people from meeting the same fate as Costia. She would have liked that. She would have liked _you_.”

"I'm honoured," Clarke says earnestly. "She sounds like an incredible woman and I wish I could have met her."

It's strange how one's perception of another person can change so drastically in such a short space of time. It feels like Lexa has known Clarke for years, not just a couple of short weeks, and she can hardly believe that only a few days ago, Clarke was somebody that Lexa found irritatingly obnoxious. The Clarke that Lexa sits with now could not be more of a contradiction to her initial judgement of the girl from Nassau. Those qualities - Clarke's stubbornness, her perseverance - are still there but now they are qualities that Lexa admires and envies, and Lexa sees them layered between other traits - compassion, loyalty, and strength even in the face of truly dire adversity.

In a way, Clarke is just like Costia. The two are vastly different in terms of personality, like the difference between land and the sea, but the presence of both brings out the best in Lexa and makes her want to always strive to be a better version of herself.

Lexa never thought she would ever find herself wanting to open up to another person again after Costia's tragedy and the agonising heartbreak that followed, yet here she is, spilling stories from her past to an almost stranger.

The last time she did that...

Thousands of memories flash through the front of Lexa's mind in a single instant, but there is one that stands out more than the others, the one from the night that she and Costia met.

"I want to show you something," Lexa says abruptly, getting to her feet and gesturing for Clarke to do the same. 

She makes sure that her hat and coat are piled neatly at the foot of her bed, then unbuckles the belt carrying the scabbards for her dual swords with fumbling fingers, laying them carefully on top of her fur bedcovers too. 

It's a big gesture. Lexa wears her swords strapped to her side from the moment she wakes until she lays her head to rest at the end of the day. When she wears her hat, coat, and swords, she is Captain Woods, respected commander of the sea, but for this, for what she is about to share with Clarke, she wants to bare herself as just Lexa, a humble pirate with an appreciation for the beauty in the vast world.

"Come with me," Lexa says to Clarke. When Clarke gets to her feet, the bottle still clutched in her hand, Lexa adds, "Leave the rum. We don't need it."

Lexa leads the way out of the cabin and onto Polis' deck. It was already late when they arrived into Tortuga and their quest to find comrades for an assault against Nia took them well into the early hours of the morning. Though the sky is still dark, the firsts glimmers of morning light are just starting to seep into the inky blue sky on the horizon, and Lexa knows that they doesn't have long until the break of morning comes in its entirety.

"Have you ever climbed the rigging of a ship before?" Lexa asks Clarke.

Clarke's head tilts back as she glances up at the mast that towers above them, seeming impossibly high from where they stand at its base on the deck. She looks at Lexa with anxiety on her face as she shakes her head.

"I'll be right behind you," Lexa assures her. "You can take it as slowly as you want. Your arms might start to hurt after a while but you can stop and loop them through the rigging to take a rest. The hardest part is ignoring the wind and the swaying of the ship as you get higher but that won't be as bad while we're docked as it would be out to sea." When Clarke still doesn't look entirely convinced, Lexa adds, "The view when we reach the top will be worth it, I promise."

They start their ascent, Clarke first and Lexa right behind her, calling up encouragements and reassurances every time Clarke looks a little shaky. Lexa has been climbing ships for well over a decade and could probably reach the top of Polis in just a couple of minutes, even blindfolded, so this is a comparatively slow climb, but once Clarke picks up the technique and settles into a rhythm they start making faster progress and the crow's nest above them becomes gradually bigger with each rung of the rigging.

When they finally reach the top, Lexa instructs Clarke to stay where she is while she climbs around Clarke and hauls herself effortlessly over the barred railing that encircles the crow's nest. She reaches both hands down and helps Clarke to do the same, finally relaxing when they are both safely inside.

"Wow," Clarke exhales, gaping around in awe.

The view is indeed breathtaking. Behind them, the town is still full of life, hundreds of oil lamps flickering and bathing everything in an orange glow. Ahead of them, the sea stretches out for miles, beyond the cliffs and beaches of the cove that secludes Tortuga from the rest of the Caribbean, all the way to the horizon, where the yellow of the sky hails the imminent arrival of the rising sun.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" says Lexa, sighing happily. She remembers showing Costia the same view for the first time and receiving the same stunned silence in response.

They sit down, legs hanging through the bars of the crow's nest, and watch as the sky gradually gets lighter on the horizon.

With memories of Costia fresher in her mind than they have been for a long time, there's still one thing that Lexa feels as though she has to settle with Clarke.

“Listen," she starts, getting Clarke's attention as blue eyes wide with curiosity turn to look at her, "what Anya was saying earlier about there always being a girl involved…”

“Lexa, I don’t care," says Clarke, resting her hand on Lexa's leg.

“No, please," Lexa insists, ignoring the way that her heart pounds in her chest at the feeling of Clarke's warm palm, even through the material of Lexa's dark britches. "I just want you to know that it’s not true. Costia was the only one.”

“I thought nothing of it," Clarke shrugs. "It doesn’t bother me whether you have a preference for men or women or both or neither. And I couldn’t care less whether there’s been one woman or a hundred. It doesn’t matter to me." Clarke pauses, then squeezes her fingers against Lexa's thigh before she continues, "And … and what Anya was suggesting, you know? Between you and me? To be quite honest, I’m flattered more than anything else that she saw me as somebody worthy enough to receive that kind of attention from somebody like you.”

“Somebody like me?” Lexa queries, her words almost getting stuck in her throat.

“You know…” Clarke answers vaguely, then glances away, her cheeks pinkening slightly. "You’re so brave, and strong, and yet so compassionate and..." Clarke takes a deep breath and continues, "and you lost somebody so special to you yet you kept going, you kept fighting for the rights of so many other people who don’t deserve to call you their Commander. I admire that a lot.” Clarke frowns, a hint of sadness in her eyes as she stares out at the yellows and oranges of the sky ahead, and then finishes, "I don't think I know how to continue without him."

 Lexa covers Clarke's hand on her leg with her own, leaning into Clarke's side slightly as she reassures her, "You lost your father earlier this week. I’ve had three years to grieve for Costia.”

“But still…”

“But nothing. _You_ are the brave one. You’ve faced one obstacle after the other on this journey and you haven’t let it stop you from doing what you believe is right.”

Clarke glances up, the little smile that tugs at the corners of her mouth almost enough to mask the sadness in her eyes, as she teases Lexa, "Most of those obstacles were you."

“Sorry," Lexa mumbles, though she does smile softly in amusement. Clarke's comment does lead to wonder if her answer back in Nassau would be different, if she had the hindsight to know how things would turn out. But this journey that they have been on, right the way from their first meeting when Lexa threatened Clarke with a blade to her throat to where they are now, sitting at the top of Polis' tallest mast and sharing stories as if they have been friends for years, despite the tragedy of Clarke losing her father along the way, has been one of Lexa's greatest adventures. And if it continues as she intends it to, with her plunging the blade of her sword through Nia's heart, it will go on to be her greatest triumph as a captain.

And all because of Clarke Griffin, an unknown island girl who has unwittingly changed Lexa's view on the world forever.

(However long that forever might last, though Lexa tries not to think of what might happen if a confrontation with Nia does not go her way.)

“I know this isn’t really my place to say because I didn’t know your father," Lexa says, lacing her fingers through Clarke's and giving them a gentle squeeze, "but I think he’d be very proud of you right now. You really are an incredible woman, Clarke Griffin.”

 Clarke glances away, a pretty blush decorating her cheeks as Lexa continues to flatter her.

“Ever since I first met you I’ve been intrigued by you," confesses Lexa. "Frustrated as hell, but intrigued. There’s just something about you that catches my attention. And then what you said the other day, it _changed_ me. Because of you I’m trying to do something that I should have done three years ago. You’re a true inspiration, Clarke."

On the horizon, the sun chooses that exact moment to appear over the sea. The sky lights up in a dazzling explosion of yellow, almost blinding in its sudden intensity. From the central point, where white hot orb of the sun slowly creeps up in the sky, the rays are visible shooting outwards in every direction, a beacon of light signalling the arrival of a new day in Tortuga.

Beside her, Clarke raises a hand to shield her eyes and lets out a breathy, "Wow."

Lexa must have watched the sunrise hundreds, if not thousands, of times, but it is a sight she will never grow tired of. When she was younger, watching the sun slowly emerge of the horizon from the deck of Gustus' ship was a reminder of the huge world out there waiting to be explored, a symbol of hope for an abandoned orphan kid trying to find her way. In the early years of her captaincy, with Costia by her side, the sunrise was a symbol of their love, a reminder of the night they met and a promise of an endless number of new days together. Since Costia's death, Lexa has climbed to the highest point of _Polis_ at the end of some of her darkest nights and the explosion of colour on the horizon has allowed to reminisce the happy times in her past, as well as reminding herself of why she must be the Commander and starting the new day with a fresh mind.

Today, watching the sunrise with Clarke is a symbol of new beginnings, of this terrifying yet incredible adventure they are about to go on where Lexa will either avenge Costia or join her. It's an overwhelming prospect, Lexa's most daring mission yet, but with Clarke by her side feeding her courage she hasn't known since Costia, Lexa is full of hope that together they can pull it off.

“That’s a beautiful sight to fall in love to," Clarke muses softly from beside Lexa.

"What?"

Lexa's eyes widen and her head jerks to look at Clarke. Surely she can't be suggesting that...

"You and Costia," Clarke explains, and Lexa's heart drops in her chest a little bit, before Clarke repeats, "It's a beautiful sight to fall in love to."

Lexa can't tear her eyes away from Clarke as she replies, "Yes, it is."


End file.
